Today, I've got something really special for you.
You may not realize this, but we're living through one of the most extraordinary moments in history.
How we live, how we work, and how we build is all changing with the rise of AI.
It's both exciting, but it's also often overwhelming.
Many of us are wondering if we're falling behind, what we should be paying attention to and what we can safely ignore, and also just how to best use some of these new tools and technologies in our lives and in our work.
That is why I am so unbelievably excited to announce the launch of a new podcast called How I AI with Claire Vo.
The mission of Claire's new podcast is to show you how people from all walks of life have figured out how to use AI tools in their day -to -day life to improve both the quality and efficiency of their work.
What makes this podcast unique is that it's designed to give you highly practical and actionable tips and tricks and workflows that you can copy and start using immediately.
No philosophical debates about the future of humanity or pontification on what might be possible someday.
Each episode is gonna be about 30 minutes, often shorter.
The guest will share one or two specific use cases that they found useful in their work, and there'll be live screen sharing to show you exactly how they do everything that they describe.
I couldn't imagine a more perfect host for this podcast than Claire Vaux.
Claire is an a three time chief product officer, a founder, and on the side has been building her own AI product that's now making six figures.
What I love about Claire is that unlike a lot of people online, she doesn't just talk about using AI.
She lives and breathes it and builds with it, and is constantly sharing everything she's learning online.
I can't wait for you to learn from her, and from her amazing guests.
This is the first ever new podcast under the Lenny's Podcast Network.
hour. Depending on how this goes, we may add more podcasts down the road.
And just to be clear, nothing changes with Lenny's podcast, this is just more free content coming your way every Monday morning.
If you're building products, leading teams, starting a company, or just want to learn how to actually use AI in your life, this podcast is for you.
What follows is the first episode of the podcast. If you like what you hear, head on over to howiaipod .com to find future episodes.
And a pro tip for the richest experience, since there's going to be a lot of screen sharing and live demos, you're going to want to watch the video version.
So definitely check things out on YouTube or on Spotify, which includes a video.
Now here is the first episode of How I AI with Claire Vo.
Can you do something that used to take two weeks and two hours, and that's like a 40 times speed increase.
So that's kind of like the number that I have in my head, generally like what's the most optimistic case, if you kind of remove all the bottlenecks, something that would take 40 hours would take one hour.
If you're suggesting to us that AI is going to raise the bar on what's possible to do, you are certainly setting the standard. The majority of human engineering will be removing tech debt, such that AI engineers can actually ship features.
It's also scary I think, which is why I think so many people shy away from this stuff is like there is this part why change is uncomfortable is that change can kill you.
There's like a fear of change.
It's like job security, right?
But at the end of the day, I think it's sort of also job insecurity.
Hey everyone, welcome to How I AI, a podcast on how AI is transforming how we get things done.
I'm Claire, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools.
Today, I have an absolute powerhouse guest, Sahil Lavingia, CEO and founder of Gumroad.
If you don't know Gumroad, it's the platform that has helped creators sell over a billion of products directly to their audiences.
Siheel has been at the bleeding edge, using AI to transform how companies build products and write code, doing everything from open -sourcing the entire Gumroad repo, to paying his employees thousands of dollars if they can write more AI -powered code than he does.
Today he's going to show us exactly how he does it.
Let's dive in. This episode is brought to you by Enterpreit.
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That's E N T E R P R E T .com Hey, so I'm super excited to have you here.
And before we dive into the demos, I wanted to call out something that you said a couple days ago, which is Devin, the AI Engineering Agent, who I also love, is writing 41 % of your PRs right now and you expect it to go to 80 % by the end of the year.
So do you think that's the baseline that we should all be shooting for?
Do you think you're way ahead of the curve?
Where should we all be compared to that benchmark that you just said?
I feel like I tell the team constantly, like we have a lead, you know, but the lead is getting shorter and shorter.
Every, every day every week there's a new model coming out.
So I would say like by the end of next year, I would suspect that like every engineering team at any company is, you know, using Cursor and Devan and V zero and all these tools to ship, you know, A multiple times faster.
And the question is, is mostly like can we organization adapt such that those people can do so right?
Like the bottlenecks are are show up in other places.
Like togy just tweeted about, you know, his salpify AI stuff today.
And I think that becomes the question is like, how fast can you actually change your organization, your culture, especially when you're remote, it's harder to make these big changes across the org to get people to learn new stuff, to try and fail and cross your learnings, you know, all that all that kind of stuff.
Okay, so we're gonna do it one at a time, which is you're going to show us how you actually redesign or build something using these tools.
So we'll get your screen up and you can walk us through how you think about things.
Awesome. Yeah, I mean, that's why I think the coolest thing about all this AI stuff is that you get to spend more time doing what you really enjoy, which to me, and I think you as well, like solving customer problems. And for this product that we It's called Flexile.
And it's uh, you know, you can think of it like a, like a store deal but built specifically for the way that we run the business, which is like hiring a bunch of people, a lot of project -based, a lot of hourly based, monthly retainers, all sorts of different types of people, remote, in person, full -time.
Let them choose their equity split, uh, manage your cap table, all of that stuff and like the same product.
And one of the reasons I love AI is that I can basically just use the product and instead of running into some issue, and being like, Hey engineer, can you go solve this?
And then spending all this time, like writing up a spec, you know, then putting that into, you know, Sending that to a designer that designer will then do it like tomorrow or the next day we'll then do a mock.
There'll be some back and forth and then it will go to like next week on Monday.
It'll go to an engineer.
They may have some questions that goes back to the designer and by the time it shifts, you know, it makes it to production even for something relatively trivial, you know, it's been two weeks or something.
Right? And so like, can you do something that used to take two weeks and two hours and that's like a 40 times speed increase.
So that's kind of like the number that I have in my head generally, like what's like the most optimistic case, if you kind of remove all the bottlenecks, something that would take 40 hours would take one hour and thus pretty awesome.
So even in this form, like pretty simple and I built a software, so I'm like, you know, I'm not like saying, Oh, it's so terrible, but there's always room to, and even on this one screen, which is the contractor invitation page.
There's already a couple of things that I notice that aren't big enough to really ask someone to do.
Everyone's busy, they have their own stuff that they're working on.
But there are a few things that I notice.
For example, the date picker is kind of terrible, it just uses the native date picker.
It's not humanized, you know, you can't type in like, next Monday or this Monday.
or have like a nice date picker, you know, if you go to like shad .cn, and this is the beauty of open sources, you know, the, why AI is so good is there's a lot of open source.
You get like a nice date picker like this, right.
It's like nicely humanized and you can do all sorts of cool stuff.
So that's like one thing I noticed that I think is like a really good candidate for this.
I would go straight to Deb and I will, you know, it's, it doesn't really really need that much scoping.
It's kind of just like we're placed date widget, you know, date picker in contractor invitation screen with a shad .cn date picker.
We might as well. I mean, the cool thing with Devin is you can like do that while you do other stuff.
So there's no risk really.
So I can select the flexL repo and you know, say for this specific page, like update the date thicker from the browser native, you know, input to ShadCN import if required.
I've never actually used this button, but again, this is a good example.
Like even somebody who's using this stuff, like you have to constantly like up your game and learn more, you know, basically I think this should be really like a rich text like this.
Like you can just type into it and you could type in like next Monday.
I think recent at a cool demo like this, where they have more like a natural language, something like this.
And you could type in yeah, in one hour tomorrow at nine AM these sorts of things.
or Slack actually has something similar where if you go into a Canvas, this is our roadmap if you type in Thursday.
This is what I think would be really cool.
So I think I'm going to have Dev and do multiple versions and then we can take a look at how far I've gone on that.
But this is how I would generally work is I would just take these forms and say I'll build this form.
So you're putting into vZero, you know, use this form using the very descriptive, great requirements, magical.
So, and then you're going to use vZero to get a prototype?
Yeah, so generally, my flow is vZero, Devin, cursor is probably how I would say it, like, generally I vZero is my prototyping tool of choice.
And, uh, once I have like a really good prototype that I'm happy with, then I go to Devin and if Devin sort of fails to completely finish, then I open it up in cursor though I, I think last week, Devin launched this pairing mode where you can actually like jump in and so I haven't really experimented with them yet, but that's presumably, I would use something like that going forward where I could actually just jump in and fix the changes.
The nice thing is DevNet actually runs.
One of the most annoying things about being a developer is just getting set up, just getting your developer environment set up, your end variables, local host. One of the tips I have for engineering organizations that are large, which is if you can make your environment easy to set up for AI, it's probably a lot easier to set up for new hires.
So it pays off to sort of use that as a testing ground for how easy it is for any new engineer to get started whether or not AI.
So, you have V0 in theory going, there it goes.
So you have V0 going on building your prototype.
I have a question here which is, you mentioned Shad Cn as your component library.
Was that driven by using these AI tools.
and those component libraries being out of the box?
Or was that something you were looking at before?
Yeah, it was a huge reason to switch and try to adopt a lot of these tools.
And I think it's one reason that I think many people really, it hasn't clicked, I guess, the AI stuff.
They're like, oh, I tried it, it didn't really work.
It's not that good, it makes a lot of mistakes.
Basically, it's faster for me to do it than to have AI do it.
And I found that that's like, a lot of it is just like AI is good at certain things.
It's really good at front -end, it's really good at React, is really good at tailwind and stuff so if you're not using those sorts of tools you're not going to get the value.
Like trying to ship something like this with like rails in the back end and like hot wire or whatnot in the front end like these just doesn't exist like you you would have to spend all your time just getting this to work you know some jQuery calendar thing you think you know that's how Gumroad was for a long time.
One of the things I wonder is if you know engineering leaders will decide on particular transitions or migrations to make just to power this stuff so that their teams can move a little bit faster because they're just seeing themselves be left so far behind compared to those who are maybe using some of these libraries and technologies natively.
I actually think that like the majority of human engineering will be removing tech debt such that AI engineers can actually ship features basically like designers will be shifting features because if you think about it, what are they doing?
Right? They are thinking about what the feature should do and then engineers are just basically setting up the groundwork, the framework, the defaults, the standards, the linting, the CI pipeline, the infrastructure, the dev set up such that designers actually are more and more capable over time of like basically taking their idea like if you were a designer, you know, you would like just design this part, you know, you designed this, but you wouldn't design like all the little interactions in here, right?
Like you would just design like though, because it would just take too long, or you wouldn't even consider it, because you didn't play, you know, you didn't, for example, like often, you'll have a designer and they'd be like, didn't consider mobile.
Okay, so you got this design, let's take a look at it.
It looks pretty good.
It has the magical date creation, which is type, there you go, type a magical date and it works.
So it's not just the design, it's the functionality.
And you said the next step for you from V zero is into Devin.
So how does that transition work?
What are you doing?
Yeah, normally I would have a few and fours here.
You can spend like three or four prompts, like 10, 20 minutes, like really nailing like the interaction, right?
You may say like, at a clear button or when you hit Delete, it should actually delete.
And this stuff will get only faster and faster and faster.
But once you're happy with what you have, Normally I would take like the final prompt and I would just paste that into Devin, you know, and I would basically do a similar to what I was doing before.
Yep. And I can see Devin doing its thing, having lots of fun and I can start a new Devin and basically do that, right?
So like on here, on this page, and then I would go here.
Build this form. Yeah.
It's often. I mean, sometimes if I'm going back and forth and I learn stuff, like I'm like, for example, this.
Yep. I may just add here.
You know? Like all the, these are kind of like learnings where I could, it's basically I'm like, oh, my spec could have been better.
Like this, these are things that human engineer also would have maybe not done.
You know, like I basically just kind of go back and forth and like, build, basically I'm like the visa was kind of clarifying my spec in a way.
Do you use any of the code from these zero?
Sometimes I do, like sometimes I'll take this and just use this command.
And if I put this and I went into cursor, uh, if I had cursor open on something, if I had to say I had to open on this, for example, I would just go to terminal and I would just paste this right in and it would put in this component.
Uh, this is for a different repo so it didn't have shaazin but it would basically like slot that file in and then I could reference the file and And, uh, you can also, I believe just like, you know, you could, you could, uh, you could, uh, share it and you can literally like, just give the URL effectively, right, like this.
And you could just say like, you know, mimic, mimic this, right?
You know, you can say more things, you know?
For example, I noticed that like in this thing, like I probably don't want the date to change in -line.
I like this parentheses is kind of weird. I'd probably add like a little note, you know, so I'd be like, uh, putting the date in parental disease is kind of weird, but at below the input as a note.
Yeah. I love putting I don't know what this does, but for some reason, if I feel like I'm vibing with this person, like they know what I mean when I say note, I mean like, slightly smaller font size, like gray, you know, like note, like I feel like a designer would get it.
So you know, this is kind of like what I would give to Devin and, and then it would, it would, you know, run off and and do its thing.
It'll wake up and it'll do all these things, all, all the stuff that I would basically do right open cursor, get the thing, find, find the files.
I need to get changes.
But I personally, one of the things I think is really, really important is spending more time in v zero.
Like, I think many people just like they do a first pass and basically I think MVPs are no longer enough.
like you can actually spend like 10, 20, 30, 40 minutes here.
If you know that Devin is going to be able to execute, like sometimes you don't want to spend too much time here because it just creates work for the engineer.
Right. And you're like, Oh, now I have to think about this and that and this and like all these like little bits that would make the customer feel really good.
Uh, the user experience would go up, but the developer experience would go down.
Right. But if you know an AI is going to be implementing all of that stuff and they're going to do it at like a very high level of conscientiousness, you might say, Oh, by the way, redesign it to like have this or like, you know, different roles, for example, right?
Like different roles have different amounts, go a preview in the dropdown, you know, so one may be like 200 an hour, one may be like two pay per project, et cetera.
You know, one may be 250 K a year.
Just for fun. I might say like one may even have multiple pay rates because I've been exploring this idea, generally.
And I think part of the beauty of not doing it yourself is to happy accidents.
like AI may just take your, your spec and actually do a benefit with it then you would have. And so, yeah, that's kind of how I use it.
And then I generally if you're hosted, you know, depending on the projects our newer projects are all next JS hosted on Vercel.
So they'll even give you like a preview branch where I mostly love doing front end stuff with Dev, and actually now with they have this pairing thing, I could actually go in and like run Rails console and check the back -end stuff too.
But you know, with preview branches, like I love making changes to ant idi work .com because I can test them almost immediately, right?
I can be like, you know, let's say a new person joined the company.
You know, I can just say, Hey, add this person who joined the company.
This is their motto, by the way, yeah, pick a fun icon that matches for them.
Like I didn't pick any of these icons.
I would not have made myself a king.
For example. I just said, like I basically just asked everyone in Slack, like tell me if you want it to link anywhere and what your, what you want your, you know, your, your slogan to be.
And then I asked Devin to actually do it and pick an icon for each person.
That brings me to something I was thinking about, which is when you were in D0 and you were asking it to add on features, I was playing the product manager in my brain and I was thinking, oh, in past lives, people would say, No, that's scope creep.
We're just focused on the date picker or we're just focused on updating this component.
We can't kind of scope creep and add more and more features.
And what I think is interesting, I'm curious your point of view, is you can really start to go to the edges of some great user experience and it's less about how much time will this take or is it too complicated?
It's more about what's actually going to work and be useful.
Yeah, totally. And I often, maybe this annoys some people at the company.
But as I'm doing vZero stuff on other things, I'll go into the issue and be like, let's see if I have one here.
I wanted to improve the multiple pay rates per roll.
And I'll just go in here and be like, you know, like this one I had, and I was doing something with Gusto and I kind of liked it.
You know, and I was like, you know, I turn on this and it's just free.
People can ignore it if they want, but it's like free design research, you know, uh, so all of a sudden they have an example of this.
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That's V -A -N -T -A dot com slash How I AI for the free compliance for AI checklist. I see you as an individual being able to add this and fix that and update the homepage and all those things and use Devin sort of asynchronously.
I'm curious how you've made this work at the team level.
Like what are the actual operational pieces that have to be in place for this to not do into chaos and then what about just culture makes this work for you all?
Yeah, I mean first off it's not easy.
Change is uncomfortable, right?
It requires work and energy and biologically I feel like we're trying to save our energy all the time.
So you have to, you know, you have to motivate people, you have to make it exciting.
You know, there's a reason like colleges and classes are in person, right?
Like, there's a... It's like fun to train together, you know, it's easier to go to the gym, in a gym than like at home in your bedroom, right?
And part of it is doing it myself too.
You know, like if your manager, your annoying boss is telling you to do something, it's different than like leading from the front a little bit.
I often do like screen shares, actually, like I recorded these videos and I recorded this one with, uh, Josh Pigford on YouTube, which is like three hours long.
And I basically did it because I wanted to, I was like, this isn't, you know, got a lot of views actually, like I w I, that's that's how important I felt it was, not just for me, but for everybody.
But I was, like, basically recorded it for the team.
I had my team in mind as I was doing it, like, check out how cool it is.
Imagine once we switched to tailwind, like, how fast we can do this kind of thing and, like, how, it sort of is part of that, bringing the energy.
We also financially motivated people.
So there's a couple of times, here I'll find you an example of a Devin competition we did.
So we did this competition where we did $33 ,000 and merges more Devin PRs than me over the course of May.
So, you know, it's a kind of a fun way to like motivate people to learn.
It's time bound. And I actually did pretty well.
Let's see the results.
So I got fourth. I opened 27 PRs with Devin and then three people beat me.
So, it's, you know, I do a lot of easy wins.
So like props to all the engineers who did it.
yeah, this is all my Devon PRs, a lot of people are like, there's no way you use Devon, like, you're making it up.
You're just trying to like go viral or whatever.
I'm like, not really.
Like, I'm just trying to like help people be more productive.
I didn't know that was controversial, but yeah, there's like a lot of small things.
Like remove this part of the homepage.
There was this like recap that we do in Slack that's generated by AI, that recaps like everything that shipped last week.
And so I said, hey, Devon, could you, you know, like, for example, these two things don't really need to be here because there's So I just said, Hey, at Devin, like, could you like, you know, only show the products that actually have shipments and like hide the other ones.
And also like some of these aren't really shipments like this one is only the backend that front end hasn't shipped yet.
So like make sure you know, the pro update, the A .I.
prompt that we're using for this, which by the way, I've never seen like I just I just know that there's an A .I.
prompt that's involved and you know, and that's actually what this what this one is.
So it found the flack weekly, you know, recap, and it, it you know, it, it, it made these changes and it created this PR.
So we can actually go in and see this PR and we can, uh, confirm my, my suspicion or not, which is, Oh, turns out there's a prompt, it's focused primarily on shipments, feature improvements, and bug fixes, right, prioritize these categories.
And then it also did something here, uh, which is if we looked at it, did this, added a filter so you know basically only the projects that have more than one.
The thing that I would critique about myself is that ideally we would have a test and maybe there is a test that I don't know about so this is when the human would come in.
I don't normally just hit merge on these things you know I would normally send this to somebody else and be like hey I did my best shot at this and you could see here for the Slack recap don't include project names I don't know and then I pasted this the link to the update you know I would normally like say, Hey, well then you make sure this looks good to you.
And if there are any tests that need updating and personally, I think this is way better that like someone has done most of the work for you.
And basically I think humans will start the process.
I think of it like flying a plane, like humans will take off, decide where to go and land typically.
do QA in the, in this context.
But you know, not actually build right all this code, right?
Like look up like, for example, you know, like dot filter versus dot trim or dot clean or, you know, like every language is different .
Right. But overall I know rough amount of software architecture that like this is, you know, this is the right solution right to this problem.
You're just adding a simple filter that removes the things and ideally there would be a test, so I would have even higher confidence that that this has done what it should, you know.
One thing I was going to call out on the code you just showed was, I find that these AI engineering tools are pretty good engineering citizens in that their code is well -commented.
They call out. There's little bit doc strings and things like that that make it easier to parse some of those changes.
Okay, so this is what we kicked off with.
It's the native date picker replaced with the ShadCN one.
Yeah, so the core problem I have here, which I guess, you know, is I need to make sure it works.
Okay, so you're showing the time -lapse of Devin here, which is basically a screen recording of every single step along the way.
Right now you're in the terminal in the IDE, so you can actually replay step by step how Devin got all this code done.
It looks like it has in here.
you know, reasoning and thought and planning.
Exactly. And then the part that I'm looking for, and hopefully it did it, is that it would run, it would run the app locally and it often does this, but sometimes if you have a complex app and we just open source this so that it may have like broken, uh, but it would actually run the browser in its little local box and then it would test it.
So let me ask it to do that around the browser and it's awake.
So it should pretty quickly start doing, doing that.
And it's, this is Devin right here.
Devin box. Mr. Devin.
Uh, and also we can watch it on this one, right.
It's, uh, it's doing its, its little thing.
So because I had used magical in quotes, it presumed that I wanted to call it magical and you can see it.
We actually opened source recently, so it's I was working on an old repo, which is my guess at why it's not working exactly.
Right. Um, so now there are two things I decided, so, you know, replace this input, the standard input with the type date, with this new component.
That's definitely correct.
And then it, uh, created this, this component where it goes through and it, it, uh, replaces it.
So the thing that looks wrong here is it doesn't feel - it doesn't look like there's any AI magic.
So something's sort of making, which maybe it doesn't need to, maybe it's know if I just type in today, tomorrow or yesterday, but you know, this probably wouldn't work if I said like three Sundays from now, but maybe that's fine.
Maybe that's not actually what anyone would really do.
This maybe even as a good example of something that, to your point.
Like I think AI has really good hygiene, engineer hygiene, where it is on a micro level, like it's a better engineer than human engineer would be.
So you have to spend more time on like the architecture and like the planning aspect of it, making sure your execution is correct, like calling it magical date picker maybe is not the correct approach. I would probably call it natural language date picker or something like that because magical doesn't really give you any insight into what's magical about it.
But besides that, my guess is like this code, this natural language is actually like probably really, really robust, really good.
Even this magical look, check out the math on this know, like, whoa, pretty simple, but like, how long would it, you know, how many times would you have to tweak it to like, Oh, I, you know, like, I got it wrong.
This is like fancy add days function.
Like it's pretty, uh, it's pretty clever how it's doing, how it's doing that.
Find index. It's getting all, you know, it's basically figuring out like when you type next Monday, it's like three days and you're adding the days to get to the right, right day in the calendar.
And it's parsing the day based on it's like, that's like, this would be like a Yeah.
Two years ago, this would be like a, so impressive for like, this would be almost like an engineering challenge, you know, like I would hire an engineer based on this, which is now they would just go to chat .gpt and be like and yeah, it would, it would, it would work.
So what you could do is to go back to the V Zero.
If you really wanted to enhance this, you know, you could just sort of take this component and actually working on a way to like embed, you know, bring a component back into VZero and then you can like iterate on it.
And the UX, like a designer could even do that with VZero, and then you then pull it back into the code base.
So you could like, do a lot of this, like, customer focus iteration, you know, on the, in a WYSIWYG way, basically, like Dreamweaver, you know, versus like, like in code, I mean, like this, you have to think so hard to understand, like, what how do you improve the user experience, looking at this, right, the amount of like brain power, and it just hurts my head.
What I think about is imagine that an engineer took this and went a week away and came back and said, here, I built your magical natural language, you know, date picker.
And you said, no, that's not really what I want.
It feels like such an expensive iteration to throw out that code and do something new, whereas you, you can iterate that on that you know, in a couple minutes or a couple hours over and over and not feel like you're wasting, you know, time and expense and people's Honestly, people's like motivation and energy.
I think about that a lot as well.
If you, if you spend two weeks on something and you're, you know, you're annoying CEOs, like, Nope, that's not what I meant.
It's like, you know, and then you got to spend, you got to go for a long walk in a coffee bag before you're back to work.
Right. So, uh, it's so much better to like really spend time here before.
Yeah. I just leaned in.
so we got a redesign from V0 on this new employee onboarding.
And not only did it get new features, but you got a beautiful update on the Datepicker with some suggested common timeframes in there.
Yeah, this is super smart.
And all I did, by the way, I just had to build a really dope natural language Datepicker for an HR product onboarding forum.
So probably the critical piece is HR.
So it's like building it in the context of the problem you're trying to solve, which is, you know, if you're, if you're, if you're building like a, like a party planning tool, you probably have like Christmas or, you know, like, whatever, but, you know, but in this case, yeah, next Monday in two weeks, you know, probably it's going to be next Monday.
That's, my guess is that is the most common, you know, but you could say actually we're, you know, we're, we're based in a, you know, a country in which like we, we work, we start on Sundays or Tuesdays and you go, you know, And you could do all sorts of interesting things or we're in a, you know, a place in which our date, you know, we put the day before the month or whatever.
And so, yeah, it just a, it just a, yeah, just a great opportunity to like really push the envelope and just like really spend more time, even I love this.
I put the first name and last name next to each other.
So you can read it out nicely.
So we just watched you ship in a new component, build a magical and now dope date picker for your employee onboarding tool.
You showed us how to get this done across your org, and you proved that you're at least in the top five people shipping PRs with David at the company.
By the way, this is merged.
We got emerged. So it looks like I've made no mistakes.
So yeah, next week it'll be better.
The thing about that would have been at least 24 hours, so That's like a nice 10X speed increase.
This is a lot about engineering at Gumroad.
And you said, you know, 41 % of your peers are being written by Dev and you're writing code.
Yeah, what org is AI coming for next?
Where the 80 % of the work you think is gonna be started by agents?
I mean, I think you could see, you know, if you think about what are the orgs that exist, you know, it's like design, product, engineering, customer support, sales, marketing.
And I really, I don't know, actually was probably more optimistic on like full automation.
I don't think we're going to really get there for a long time.
There's just always like a higher level abstraction that you get to operate at.
So, you know, there will be, for example, like, I think there's a lot more marketing automation that could happen in terms of like suggested tweets.
Like, you know, it could just watch what's happening in GitHub.
It could like suggest, Hey, this thing, we, you know, we have a.
Content framework. We should post about this feature, right right now.
I noticed myself having to like, you know, say, Hey, this thing shipped in GitHub, by we've only shipped only the back end.
There's still all this nuance that I think, you know, marketing could get like a lot more efficient sales, too, I think like, for example, there are all these people who sign up, you know, they show up in our database, basically, right.
And they're just email, right?
You go to Flexile, you sign up.
But there's, I think, a lot more automation, you know, if someone signs up to Flexile with like, NewYorkTimes .com.
You could sort of queue up an email to them.
There's so much focus on customer support.
We even built our own customer support product with AI, which is great.
You can talk to AI and it'll help you out.
But this is all reactive.
Well, what if I'm just browsing the page and it knows that I'm in New York for my IP?
And you can wave at me and you could be like, hey, what's up?
I was in New York. It's kind of cold out there.
It's kind of rainy.
No. And you'd be like, oh, yeah, it is.
It is rainier. Why do you care?
And you can have a conversation.
And, you know, you're like, well, you know, it's kind of nice to be able to like, talk about the problems customers are facing.
So yeah, I mean, there's, there's, I think sales, like making, making support more about sales, making it more proactive.
I think making design more about product, making engineering more about architecture.
You know, I think there's always going to be stuff to do, I made maybe even like like, like prioritization.
I think I spent a lot of my time, like, you know, for example, like going through GitHub and saying, okay, we have all these tasks, we have like 27 things, like what do we build first?
And right now it's like in my head, basically I've seen all these things go live, or maybe even a better example more people would relate to would be Gumroad, you know, we have this big roadmap and you know, I basically I think I'm pretty good at this, but the reason I'm good at this is because we I've seen every single thing ship.
And so I kind of can very quickly sort of be like, okay, this is, this is, you know, going to generate like, you know, maybe a hundred to $200 ,000 in value for creators, creator earnings, this will probably generate like 300, 400k.
But then I have to also put on my engineering hat and say, okay, this is going to take like 40 hours of an engineer's time.
This is going to take 300 hours of an, you know, and like do all this.
Math, which you can go to business school and learn about byte and like all these And I could totally imagine like, you know, a button here that's like a magical rank right and then it just like sort of goes through.
And maybe you should actually know that because you missed out this fact.
It's actually much harder to ship or we don't yet use shadzian.
So actually you're underestimating this and it could like reprioritize it.
Right. And you could do all sorts of interesting things.
That's like a huge – I mean, think about how many people at these large companies, especially like they're spending so much of their time on strategy, quote unquote, which is really just prioritization.
Right? And what we do is we just email all creators and we just put together a list of things and I just, we just sent this Google doc to like our top 200 creators in 2024.
And we kind of like ranked this based on what they wanted from us because it turns out like they're the ones paying our bills.
Right? And we started shipping and imagine I could take all it in all that data.
I mean, all their sales volume we have access to, right.
In our database. And you can somehow kind of like get a good, good sense of like, okay, what, what feedback should we be listening to?
And, you know, you can imagine, like, you just hit a button that says, like, you know, assign to Devin, you know.
And then, boom, it's done.
I mean, that's another weird thing though.
Right. It's like, well, if, if AI gets so good, why do you need to, to do everything?
That why, why what's the point in prioritization.
Prioritization is a function of, like, limited resources.
That's the whole thing.
I mean, I would love to be in a place where I come into the office and I have no idea what's going to happen.
I have no idea what we should even be building, and we spend time as a team thinking about what should we build?
There's no issues in GitHub.
Cleared. Because every issue is solved.
So, it's cleared, we're in inbox zero, and so it's like, okay, well, what do we do?
And then we just sit around and talk, and pontificate, and eat lunch and we really have to think hard about — oh, we should do something totally radical.
Like open source the whole thing?
Like AI probably wouldn't suggest that.
It wouldn't be in the next token prediction or even in the reasoning models.
We're like, OK we should do really advanced content customization options.
OK what is that? OK let's go design and V0 watch that and do a lot of research. You know, I think research is obviously going to get a lot better with AI.
But still humans have to go talk to people, ask them questions.
Use research, design research, market research. I think sales will always be important.
I think marketing. I think marketing will be one of those things where like the average marketing, like AI will get so good at marketing that like the level of what's interesting to a human.
Like kind of like the, you know, that meme of the Saratoga Springs guy drinking water and whatever, obviously like putting banana on his face.
Like to me, that's like a sign of how good AI is.
That like that level of content production is now necessary to go viral.
Like it's insane. I can't imagine like how long that video took to make.
It just it's so funny.
Like it's so thoughtful.
And so many funny different little like Easter eggs.
You know? And I think that like that's kind of what will need to happen is just like you have to like up the game more and more and more.
Like, you know, right now artists can post like a painting on Instagram and people be like, oh, amazing painting.
But like in five years it's gonna be like, you need to like post the frickin movie.
It's it's like, that's just what people will expect like, hey, we just want to see your like 30 minutes sci fi movie that you did.
And that's just like for free, sorry.
It's just like, that's what that's what our Doba, you know, that's what's happened to our Doba Meat System, or we can spend like a whole day talking about like, how do we get better at recommending products on Gumroad?
Is there a totally different kind of, you know, recommendation experience?
That's like, much more AI driven and much more natural language then just like a marketplace of, you know, feed of products.
Where you can it can remember things about your taste, your preferences.
You know, it can learn from you.
We're launching a community feature.
Pretty excited about this next, later this week, which is pretty big.
But we you know, there's just tons of yeah.
I mean, who knows? I mean, it's exciting.
It's also scary, I think.
Which is why I think so many people shy away from this stuff is like there is this, like part of, part of why change is uncomfortable is that like, change can kill you.
You know, like there's like a fear of change, like you know, it's like job security.
But, but at the end of the day, I think it's sort of also job insecurity.
Like we don't know if like what we do will continue to be valuable.
I can say for sure, if you're, if you're suggesting to us that AI is going to raise the bar on what's possible to do, you are certainly setting the standard. I think you're showing an entirely new way for teams to build, you're showing an entire new way for a leader to show up and actually contribute to the work product of the company, which we think is really inspirational.
And then I think you're also showing, look, you just have to go learn these things and try things.
And you're gonna get in a loop.
But over time, you can actually become one of these leaders that's on the leading edge, as opposed to the lagging edge.
So I think it's great, and I think you're setting the standard for how EPD Orgs are gonna operate in the future, if not companies.
So we're gonna wrap up with a quick lightning round.
two questions if you can encourage people to learn just one of all all your toys here you just showed just one that you think is the highest impact which one would it be?
V0 honestly. I mean that's a bias I think because I spend so much time in product.
I think of our more of an engineer I think cursors agent mode is pretty crazy.
I think if you're like a CEO of a company I think Devon is like the most impressive of like the fact that you can just be in Slack and just talk to it and it will, it will do this.
It's crazy. So I think a lot of it depends on like your role and you know, what you value and what you think is the most important, but if you zero, I think it's just like the lowest hanging fruit.
I think everyone is kind of familiar with Figma and I think a lot of people think that like, you know, okay.
Now people, no one questions that AI can code, even though a year ago people were like say, Oh, we can't code or whatever, but now people are like, Oh, he can't design it doesn't have taste, you know, and so it's just like really, you know, like design a really nice onboarding wizard for a bank, you know, and like watch it do a better UI for a bank than any bank has, you know, so I think that this is like something anyone can do.
A kid could like have fun with this.
So I would say, yeah, probably nominate V0, and then, you know, the cool thing about V0 is it shows you what's possible.
And so then if you want to execute on it, then you have to, like, learn all the other all the other tools.
The other nice thing about v .zero is that it comes with a URL, so you could build like Tic Tac Toe and send it to your friend and play Tic Tac Toe, you know which is a kind of a nice, you know, or replator bolt on you or lovable like there there's just so many.
We've talked a lot about how you are setting up incentives like Bounties to get people to use AI or learn AI, but how do you get AI to do what you want?
So I found that everybody has their own tactic.
Like they're mean, they offer money.
What is your strategy for getting AI to listen to you when it's in a little bit of a loop?
I mean, honestly, capital letters, not in like a mean way, hopefully.
Hopefully it doesn't take it the wrong way, but I just think it's like, it is, you know, kind of like, it's kind of old school, I guess, you know, you have like literally like lower case and upper case.
And like, it's just a really easy way of saying like, this part is a really important, like, please do not ignore this specific part, there's another hack that I love called, et cetera.
So if you want a list of things, you can name like two of them and then just say et cetera, and it will often like riff.
It's really fun to just like, be like, it's kind of like a test, you know, it's like you've come up with two or three, but you need 10 it's, it's kind of a Well, this has been incredible, and we have to wrap by showing you have not only redesigned your own product, but you've taken on the baking industry by generating a onboarding for a neo -bank, apparently, here in vZero.
I really appreciate you giving us a real look at how you're building with AI both as individual and as a team.
I think you're definitely gonna inspire tons of people to rethink how they show up at work.
And I think if you folks to be looking over their shoulder, thinking that you're about to lap them once or twice on some of this building.
So, thank you so much for the time, where can people find you and how can they be helpful to you?
Yeah, you can find me on twitter slash x, my handle is at s h l.
And helpful I don't know just anytime you see something I've said that you disagree with or think of my thoughts could be improved upon, just reply, let me know, DM me.
I'm always looking to get feedback and improve my thinking.
So I just appreciate everyone tuning in and excited to see what everyone builds.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thanks so much for watching.
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