Detailed Notes
Season 25 of Building Better Developers with AI wraps up with a fully human conversation.
After more than thirty episodes experimenting with an AI-assisted podcast recap, hosts Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche reflect on what they learned using AI to revisit past seasons, uncover new topics, and spark deeper discussions.
In this finale they share: * Key insights from months of AI collaboration * Where AI helped most—and where it fell short * Practical tips for creators considering their own AI-assisted workflow
Listen in as they review the surprises, successes, and lessons that will guide future seasons.
🎧 Full transcript and blog post: https://develpreneur.com/season-25-ai-assisted-podcast-recap/
#AI #Podcasting #Developers #SeasonRecap #ContentCreation
Transcript Text
[Music] All right, I'm not even going to go to AI for this last for our summary. We're going to dive right into it and just riff a little bit about like what did we what did we learn? uh what did we get out of this season with AI? Probably some like, you know, pros and cons and things like that and be a little more um probably conversational and things like that, but I think it'll be something that'll be hopefully it'll be a good um you know, have us give us give us an excuse to sort of think back about like what we've gotten out of AI and maybe even talk a little bit about AI in general. So that's my thoughts. >> I like it. Um, we really only use chat tpt and co-pilot, right? We didn't really touch on or was it? >> No, we used uh Gemini. >> Okay. >> We used that like a couple of times mostly just to try it out. We did bounce between chat GPT five and four. Um, I don't know how often I actually specified which was which because I wasn't even sure sometimes because it was using like best u whatever's the you know most effective engine at the time. I just keep it sort of left. I keep it open and just do that kind of stuff. So, um >> yeah, I've had to play around with five lately because I've been getting some weird answers on the general one. Um I've gone to like the thinking one and it will actually give me a better answer. Like it takes more time, but I I'm not liking five. And I tried to go back to 40 and 40 is now um you can use it. It's limited. So, you can only use 40 a little bit unless you pay for the professional version. And I'm like, "Oh, that's crap." Because, >> yeah, I went to the pro because I was just using it so much. And I use the thinking version a lot because I'm usually doing it to say like a lot of I've been doing a lot of it to like migrate code and also to do like design things and stuff like that where I'll be like especially like that. Like I said, the RB site, I got a lot of stuff out of that where I'd be like, take this add these things to it, move this around, do that thing. It's all the stuff that like it's it's a little slow, you know, it takes a couple, you know, minute to think about it or whatever, but it's so much faster than me like going through and like, okay, can I tweak this? Got to tweak this, got to move that, got to move that. It's like all those little things, it gets me there faster. And so I'm like, yeah, because and it's stuff that I'm like, I have no desire to learn how to like totally figure out this, you know, how to do this in Bootstrap or how to do that in Tailwind. And so it's been >> really cool. It's allowed me to do updates to interfaces really fast. It's allowed me to even do some uh some coding, some like swagger stuff and things like that. It's like here, this API, go in and just like give me a better set of comments and stuff like that. Now I've got more to work with. I can go in, tweak it, boom, done. So speed, >> that's a lot of what I use it for. Um I know you get on me sometimes because you're like, "Oh, that's very AIish." But sometimes when you're just dealing with boilerplate stuff or you just need a quick, hey, just give me a quick strut or, you know, foundation for the project. I'd rather do that and spend my time working on the actual code and yeah, I'll come back and tweak it later, but if it works, it works. It's that 8020 thing. It's like, is it working? Yeah. Okay, move on. Um >> it is. It's just sometimes the code it generates is oh my gosh. So like >> and I do sometimes I get it but sometimes it's speed. It's like >> when when you're it depends where you are in the project. If you're at the point where results matter more than quality you kind of got it's one of those trade-offs. It it's a balance you got to juggle. But um just teeny nitpick and then we can jump in. Um, check your um, what is it? Above the fold uh, your image scroller on RB. One of your images is jacking up your whole page. Like when it scrolls it, the page is messed up till it scrolls again. Um, >> the RB site. >> Yeah, >> there aren't any. I don't think there's any. >> It may be on the blog because when I did like the RB, it took me to the blog page. is it whatever page you have that has like images that scroll the page got jacked up from it and then it fixed itself but it was weird. >> Um that's interesting because there shouldn't be thing left. >> It might have been something cached but I went to rbsns.com rblog. It does a little shake and then it did like a shift to an a new image and then the whole top of the page was jacked for a second till it switched back and then it was fine. So you have something cached in um Cloud. >> If you have something cached, there's not much. >> No, no. I mean, but if you're using Cloudflare, you may need to go out there and flush the cache and have it reach your page because it was weird. Like I said, it was very strange. Once it fix itself, it was fine. But it the first time I hit the page, it was very weird. It it it was like, "Hey, it looks nice." and all a sudden, whoop, you got this big image of your icon of your logo, then went back to the regular image. >> Yeah, I think what it is is that Yeah. Some because there because it's a little bit behind the uh inside baseball is basically what I do is I've got like it's it was originally has been forever a WordPress site and I had a nice little theme and I like once I started really messing with the theme, I'm like no, I'm like I'm going to override the theme. I'm just going to break out of the theme. So now I've basically I've done what I can to pull RB back to be um so that everything runs through now it's essentially my custom pages, my custom theme, my >> piece and then all I do is I use the I'm trying to use WordPress as just a a headless post producer and stuff like that. Um, I'm half tempted to even yank some of that stuff out. But there are still ways you can get back once you're back into like the actual WordPress engine. Then there's some older stuff that it's just like I'm not going to try to like I'm trying to figure out how to block all that so that it never goes there. So everything comes back and it's using even whatever image or whatever post you're seeing and stuff like that. So that's probably what it is is you can get you like I just I was poking around poking around and I was able to get back to the old homepage. Yeah. And it's it's not awesome. Um it doesn't still it doesn't have rotating images anywhere. So I'm not sure what it did, but um and it's I I think that's the one I recently had because it's not on Cloudflare. I don't think Developer is, but uh RB I yanked it off that years ago. >> Okay. It's causing me all kinds of issues. But good to know. I'll see if I can find on my list. Um, if you have any caching plugins, see if you can clear the cache on them and have it reach because that I had that issue with Doctor Who. Uh, I had like the WP cache, which was great because I didn't update the site too often, but when they did, I had to go clear that because it's like, oh, I don't see your code changes. So, anyway, I was not trying to nitpick. It's just it was very strange how it happened. And I'm like, I'll just point it out because you were mentioning you were working on I just didn't know if you'd seen it. >> Yeah, I need to go. That's still something that's like now pretty low on my uh priority is to go back and try to figure out where anywhere that it goes to um a WordPress article or page is to make sure that it's got all of my wrapped stuff. So, it's the new look and feel. Um, I just haven't like chased all that crap down because then it's starting part of me is like I almost want to just rip out the existing theme completely and then build a custom theme that does all this. It's just I haven't gotten there yet. I that's actually what I'm going to do I think with developor is I think I'm just going to create a custom theme and just use that and and build it from there as opposed to um what I've done with RB where I was trying to sort of keep it up while I was going because there's like I've made as you probably noticed like if you go to the main RB SNS page it's dramatically different than it was um and a lot of the stuff the links the information that's in there all that kind of good stuff um I've been going through and putts with that. Um, yeah. So, cool stuff. Good to know. And that leaves us with I think it's time for us to dive right in for this last potentially last episode. We'll do a little three, two, Oops. Let me get this up. So, I'm looking at what I want to look at. Uh, we do this. Let me move this over here. Oops. I don't want you there. Um, let me try this. If I do this and move you here. Dad, come. Uh, it doesn't work the same when I've got multiple. Let me take this and move this over here. There we go. Okay. I tell you, when you got like multiple virtual screens, it gets really confused really fast. So all right, three, two, hello and welcome back. We are continuing and potentially wrapping up yet another season with developer building better developers. I am Rob Broadhead, one of the founders of the pre-mentioned developer and building better developers. Also the founder of RB Consulting where we are boutique consulting. We are a fractional CIO. Bottom line, we help businesses assess and simplify their technology. We figure out a way to walk through with you what you've got and how to leverage it so that there is a roadmap for success for moving forward for growth for your company. Bottom line, it really comes back down to we assess where we're at. Help you build a roadmap. Let's get you to a better, brighter future. Essentially, we do that through simplification, integration, automation, innovation. There's a lot of different ways that we can utilize technology that you can utilize technology, but also that we can utilize it, help you do it better. That's what we're here for. We help you craft a specific recipe for you custom to your business. We sit down and we connect your business goals and where you're at with where you want to be and how to get you there in the best and brightest future that you have ahead of you. Good things and bad things. Oh, actually, I guess I would be aiss if I didn't mention rb-sns.com. You can check out our website which has been we were just talking in the pre-show about like it has been evolving. We've been working on it. We've been doing a lot of cool stuff. Uh we like it. Give us feedback. We'd love to hear how you like it. Uh robbs.com. Uh also check out our tool matrix.rbs.com. It's really a cool way for you to get quickly to a road map of sorts. Uh it's not quite as custom, but it's one of those that definitely based on where you're at can help you figure out what your next steps are. And it's free. You just go in there, sign up, answer a few questions. I think it takes about 10 minutes, something like that, depending on where you're at. It's a little bit technical, but it will help your business get to the brighter future or at least give you the steps to do so. Back into good thing, bad thing. Good thing is uh we are wrapping up yet another season. We are This is like It really I can't tell you how much it is just heartwarming. how much it is like, you know, the endorphins and all that cool stuff. Getting through another season when you started way way back episode one and you weren't sure you were going to get through any episodes. You weren't sure how far you were going to go. You weren't how far this was going to last. And the fact that we are just like marching into now what I think 26 is going to be our next season. Uh that's a lot of seasons. It's way beyond what a lot of people do. Sometimes you have to mute your mic when you have a sneeze or two. Apologies for that. Uh the bad thing is that we are through another season. Um it is it is always a little bit of a challenge too to figure out like what are we going to do next? It's sort of funny that this has been a challenge that we have now faced multiple times like where do we go next? What do we do? What's our next topic? One of the things we may discuss is actually going out to AI and saying, "Hey, where's an area that we haven't covered?" We've done that. We actually got some pretty cool little uh information back. If you check out the YouTube channel, you'll be able to check out part of that bonus material. But first, I think I need my co-host to introduce himself. Go for it. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Malash. I'm one of the co-founders and developer building better developers. I'm also the owner of Envision QA where we help businesses take back control with their customer with custom software that builts around the needs uh not the other way around. So our focus is simple, great service, great solutions and a rockolid quality. We build tools that replace frustrating systems, streamline operations, and are fully tested to work right the first time. At Envision QA, we combine development and quality assurance to give you software that you can trust and support you can count on. Check us out at envisionqa.com. Uh, good thing, bad thing. Uh, so good thing, uh, I guess it's mixed, good and bad. So, I'm another year older, another year closer to the 50 mark. Um, not quite there yet, almost. Um, and I'm having to reflect on a lot of things and update all my freaking policies and things like that. So, you know, as you get older, you have to worry about things like mortgages, health insurance, life insurance, and well, I just got dinged by or pinged by my mortgage broker. It's like, oh, interest rates are going down again. You know, do you want to refinance? And it's like, do I uh how long do I have to retirement? it. These are questions I don't want to ask yet. But anyway, um so that's kind of the good and bad. Another year older, had a wonderful birthday, but more crap to go with it. Mute. Here's to one year older and not realizing when you've actually turned your little mic off. Apologies to that. Um, yeah, I wish I was getting closer to 50, but I'm getting closer to 150. So, that's just sort of how these things go. But more importantly, we're wrapping up this season. We have spent another 30 plus episodes talking about building better developers. This time, we did it with AI. And what we want to do in this uh this wrapup instead of and we can I mean this is we'll see where Michael wants to go but I I want to spend a little more time like uh in a meta retrospective a little bit of like look at this is what we did when we came into this was said hey AI is a big thing right now everybody's talking AI AI AI AI people that can't spell AI are talking about AI I had a conversation today and it's like with a guy they're in this area, they really need AI and they've like all these people are experts because they've done like three things. There are very few people that have spent more than I don't know 3 to six months probably playing around with AI. Most of them wrote a chatbot and it's really about like okay great everybody can spell it, we'll say, and then thinks they're an expert, but let's really talk about like how do we use it? How do we utilize it? And during this season and a little bit before, but definitely during this season, I it it really has been a journey on what does AI provide us? Where can it help us? And where do we need to still like make some progress? And I would just like in this uh I don't know this summary, this little retrospective, just look back. It's like it really has been um it's been nice as being like a third host, you know, another co-host in it that it's really brought although it has definitely touched on things that we touched on which is probably for the same kind of reasons because when you have a certain topic in a well-known field like this, there's there's like there's it's a target-rich environment. There are a lot of things that you can talk about where you're like, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense and that makes sense and that makes sense and this is probably shift mission." You know, it's like uh when we started way way back, there's things like we talk about the software development life cycle, there's certain things you're always going to talk about with the software development life cycle. If you talk about agile, there's certain things you're going to talk about. If you talk about scrum, certain things you're going to talk about. Software development in general, there's like certain areas like, you know, you're going to talk about code, you're going to talk about databases, you're going to talk about quality assurance, you're all of these things. And AI is really good about that. But what we've seen is that it's really good about touching on additional areas. It's it really is. It's another set of eyes, another set of ears to say, well, hey, have you thought about that? And I think that has been a a big boon going through this season is that there have been some areas where we didn't really connect it and sometimes where it misunderstood, we'll say, where it took it a little bit different direction, but I think we got some great uh conversations out of that. So, I'll pause there and and get your like, you know, initial thoughts. >> Yeah. So, I I I I think I don't remember which one was initially kicked off the idea of, "Hey, let's like revisit a past season with AI." Uh, but it became an interesting journey. Initially, we're like, "Oh, well, let's just see what it can do." And, um, we'll just go with it. And as we went with it, it really did a decent job of analyzing what we talked about. In some cases, it was completely different, but in a good way where it's like, oh, we didn't even think about that. And it gave us more ideas um to kind of expand upon past episodes. Uh, one of the best things I can I guess compare it to is it's like um throwing ideas at a whiteboard, seeing what will stick and AI was great for that based on the way we used it. Now, would it be great to actually flush out the content for the full episodes? I don't think so. I think we'd get into that kind of false fake um or not fake but just where it would just kind of give us an answer but not really be an answer uh for a lot of these solutions. So for something a little higher level u like summaries and outlines and things like that I think it did a great job this season. >> I think so too. I think that's a really good point is that it gives us um yes, we can get some very good details if we want to out of AI, but for something like this, it's much better at a at a high level, at a summary kind of level. It was sort of like, hey, here's an outline or something like that and let us take it from there. Um there were more than a couple times that I think it came back with some stuff where it was just like, huh, that's an interesting way to go. We don't want to go there. you know, like it would take the it didn't have the right context of the term or the topic or things like that. So, it did um it could get lost, but honestly, so can we. There are times that we would put together a topic and we would go in very different directions because we were thinking different things. So, I don't think that's a I don't know that's necessarily a knock against AI, but I think it is a uh a caution against AI. >> No, agreed. I mean, it it gives you a good it's good at giving you content, but it's not necessarily good at giving you the meat of what it is that you're trying to convey. >> Yeah. And I think that's this goes back to like some of the other things I've done with AI that are outside of the the developer real world, which actually we'll see some of this as we like part of the things I'm going to be doing when I'm revamping the website. It's basically a lot of it is like take this stuff, take this bucket of stuff and reorganize it. It's like it's sometimes it's not much different than like just shuffle this around, but sometimes the shuffling makes a big difference. It's just like AB testing where you're like, well, what if I put the button at the top versus the bottom versus the left or the right or things like that. Um, that's some of what it is. It's basically like say okay let's take this and let's take honestly in some cases um you know like best practices or standards or things like that and let's like apply that to this thing so that we can get something done um that maintains the meat of it but also dresses it up a little bit. And it's it is sort of a um gosh it's so it's really at the end of the day the things that work best are the ones that are processoriented are the things that are like there's always a series of steps that you want to get through. Um I will share which is there's a lot more to go into it but I will share that like one of the things we've done that I found has been really good is using it as a um an advisor of sorts. like we we wanted to plan trips and would throw questions at it and it would be able to go like gather a lot of information and say well particularly in cases where you're trying to figure out like you're going into new areas of research. Uh it is a great way to very quickly figure out that like this is a good path or this isn't a good path. Um, I've used it a lot since we've started into this, I think, since this season of things like saying like if I want to build an app from scratch in this realm and this is sort of the target audience and this is what I want it to look like, what are the best technologies for it? And it will give me stuff like, well, here's here's an example. here's the the popular technology or here's the technology that's going to take more time to learn but it's actually going to be a better long term. Uh those things are, you know, it can get you there, but it really does come down to it's people talk about like I had a chat with chat GPT. It really is, I think, uh where you need to go is it has to be about a chat. It has to be about you learning how to use AI as much as AI giving you that information. >> Yeah. I mean, for those of us that have been around for a while, it goes back to like the old uh dictation software, Dragon, Naturally Speak, you have to spend time teaching the tool that you're using how to interact with you. You're not just learning the tool, but the tool is learning how to interact with you, how to understand your sentence structure, your grammar, uh your reflections. A lot of times, it's interesting because when I first started with Chat GPT, I'm a bad speller. It would more or less at early on just correct my spelling and say, "Did you mean this?" Now it takes almost anything I throw at it and it returns some type of message. Now it may not be the correct response but it is a response based on the history of the interactions with the tool. So if I were to log in anonymously through chat GPT. So this is a good test for those of you that have a chat GPT account. If you use chat GPT all the time, log out, clear your browser cache or go incognito, log into chat GPT or don't log into chat GPT, but just go to chat GPT and start using it. You're going to get different responses and different interactions. You're going to find that either it's going to send you down a different path or it's not going to give you that kind of personal experience that you're used to from being logged in. So, these are just some of the things to be cautious of as you continue to learn and grow with the tools. It takes time and you need to question it. Even if you're just starting out, heck, I would ask it almost uh when once I started like building projects like Rob was just talking about like with code, I start out with, okay, I want to build a web page. So, give me a web page. I'm like, is this the best way to build the web page? Yeah. Okay. Well, all right. maybe we'll do this. And I'm like, all right. And then it would prompt me, well, who's the web page for? So, if you are asking the right prompt, it will prompt you back if it's not getting what it needs. Uh, now with 50, I'm not sure if it still does that. I would have to go back and retest that, but I would probably have to retest it in cognito because I've already gone through that learning process with Chat GPT. So, as you're learning the tool, the tool is learning you. And it just takes time. Be patient with it, but definitely spend time with it and work through it. If you question it, Google it and call it out if it's wrong. And I think that's that's really I think the context is so critical. Um, and it it goes back to it reminds me of Google food ability people's ability to write searches in Google to like get useful information back and it AI is so much like that is it really is and I I was thinking about this today as I was like I was having a chat with chat GPT and I was actually getting it to do some work for me and I knew I knew I knew I knew I was like I really am gonna I like it was one of these that I asked asked it to do something and then I had to ask it for something else and I wanted to go back to the not the prior but two prior and I was like if I don't ask this right it's going to go to one prior and not two prior and sure enough it did and it's really is it's like it's I like sometimes I like joke that it's like talking with the child that like has a very short attention span that you have to like make sure you're very clear on what you provide. I do think as Michael's mentioned like the folders and stuff like that, there are some things that it does allow it now to do a better job of keeping context, but so often uh it still will like wander off. And so it's things where I have to and it's where it actually does become worth it to have like the paid version. So you can have a bigger question where you can say, "Okay, based on this, I want you to do this and make it look like that." And it's like sometimes that's a decent amount of stuff that you need to work with. The cool thing in building a better developer and then I'm going to let you jump in on this is that the best way to get that kind of information is be dealing with small chunks. And this goes back to something we have often said is like try to break your problem that you're solving down into small chunks that are very easy then to work with and maintain. And this will also help you immensely when you get into AI. You had a thought so I want you to jump back. >> I did. Um, so you you made a comment that when working with check GPT, if you're like two or three uh chats down and you need to go back and it doesn't go back to the right one, a small tip I found with this is if you go copy the selection you want to go back to, repaste it, but start out with reset the conversation to this uh chat, paste your chat in. Sometimes it will reset everything to where you need to be and then you can continue your thread from there. Um, I found that to be more successful than just assuming it knows where to go back to. That's I actually had a conversation with a guy u not too long ago that's a AI maven or whatever but that was some that was one of the things that he we talked about in our conversation is how it's it has a very limited memory and so there it's very easy five or six requests we'll say into it to suddenly lose stuff and it just like it's sort of reset and he said that was something that was he was struggling with as he was building out longer term conversations in that is to be able to do it. And I think that's honestly, and this is like a little pro tip or whatever because this is something I've been working with. Um, I think there's a point where what you need to do is if you're building like chat bots and stuff like that for longer term conversations is to have ways to actually freeze and update the context. is very much this is very a very much a Python thing but uh very much when in Python where you if you use pip if you use their library and there's other things are like this but there's a way to like say freeze like use what I have right now give me a script so that in the future I can go back and then just and this is called requirements basically but I can use those requirements and I can suck all those in and say I want exactly this environment I want these libraries these versions that the kind that is literally the kind of stuff that we need with AI. And if you're building something that is an evolving AI, I think you need to do that. But you because AI has a it has a crap memory. It's worse than mine. And so what you need to do is you need to be able to do something where if you really are building this isn't like the chat tools. If you're building a chat tool, you're going to need to be able to do a feedback loop into that to say, "Okay, now we have knowledge that we want to like maintain and we want to push that back into the AI so that now the AI is keeping that as part of it. It's like this is what I know." It's just like if you go to like notebook LM where it's like load these documents in. It's like well I need to have those documents there. Those are the thing. It's like marking knowledge that is key knowledge. And honestly, it's funny because Michael and I have had conversations in business stuff outside of developer in recent days, weeks, months where there are things like that that I I realize I recognize now that is very much a part of the human conversation as well. You'll be like, "Hey, this is a a watershed moment or a milestone or something a marker that we want to say we have agreed on this. This is what requirements documents are all about really. We've agreed on this and so this is what we're going to use as our foundation moving forward. It's literally no different when you're dealing with AI other than AI is a little more obnoxious than I know a lot of obnoxious people. I'm not even going to say it's more obnoxious than people. But I think that's what we we didn't embrace in this season is that we didn't feed back into it. every time we asked it about a a season about a topic for and give us a couple of things to talk about, we didn't actually give it feedback on it. So that is I think why we found over and over again we got roughly the same response. It got I mean we we asked a question a little bit differently but generally speaking we got the same response because we're asking the same thing over and over. >> Yeah. Uh so one of the things as you went through that that kept coming to my mind is there are some tips and tricks you can do with AI and this may be more application desktop application version of AI versus web but I have found as I go through the process of working with AI and resetting AI if it gives me a response there is that little check box that you can check under the message. Hey, this is right. But what I have found to be more useful is if it gives me, hey, this is like exactly what I want. I respond, save this into memory. This is a good response. And for those that are not, I say, okay, this was a poor response. Reject this, but do not follow this path. And if I do that, I get better results in the long run. But if I don't do that and I just let it keep regurgitating stuff, you take kind of that long way to get there. Like it it it takes longer to get to the solution than where you tell literally tell, hey, bad bad bad go back. Here's a cookie. That's right. Here's a cookie. That's good. But >> I have to interrupt because this is you and I have this conversation. I'm like, "Okay, time out. Stop right there. Let's Let's I don't say snapshot, but it's basically, "Let's snapshot that. Can we agree?" And we can move on. I know I've done that with you. I've done that with a lot of people. I will say because she probably won't hear this. My wife gets really annoyed when I do that sometimes because I will cut her off in the middle of a sentence and be like, "Stop right there. That's a point. Let's move on from there." But that is a I'm going to let you go because that is really a very important insight into how you find ways to move AI forward instead of get into those like loops or let it spin off into space. >> Exactly. And worst case scenario, if you find yourself five or six messages into a thread, even after trying to get it corrected, stop. Create a new chat. Delete. Do not archive. Delete the old chat. Say before you delete it, say this was a bad message thread. Delete it from memory. Then delete it. Start a new thread. Nine out of 10 times I find that the new thread starts in a different path. Usually closer to what I want and it gets me there quicker. These are not things that happen overnight. Uh, a lot of times I can now jump on the chat GPT probably within about 5 10 minutes I get enough of what I need from it to go do what I'm trying to do or I get enough of a correction to like a document, an email or something that I can just jump in and go take it from there and move on. I use track GPT now more days as a good virtual assistant and a quick boilerplate like code generator like here just throw this out here and I can go from there. Sometimes it works well for more complex things but I'm still struggling with most of the chat bots to get something that will build me an enterprise solution. And I I only want to touch on this one other thing cuz I read an article on this just recently. It seems like more Seale Fortune 500 companies are actually now starting to shift away from AI a little bit because they're finding that it's costing more to get to that chatbot level of maybe this is right to something that is actually going to help the customer. And that's honestly that's the wave we've seen in technology from forever is it's like everybody like oh this is now finally the silver bullet. This is the thing that's going to solve all our problems and then everybody throws a lot of money at it and the next thing we know it's like oh no it's not solving our problems. I'm just going to say if it's just throwing a lot of money at it you're not you're not paying attention. Throwing a lot of money is not it. You've got to be there has to be wisdom in that. You can throw good money after bad all day long. Uh AI is no different from all of the other silver bullets that we've seen all the way back to like I when I started out it was things like UIs and object-oriented and things like that actually AI I did a class I was just talking again guya today I had a class 35 years ago on AI it was basically expert systems in artificial intelligence and how to do that way and things have evolved um massively since then. But the interesting thing is which is actually a really cool little observation. This guy came out of the gaming environ the gaming world and he had dealt with a lot of stuff there. There is a lot of AI built into games, the gaming world of stuff. Like think about it like if you're sitting there and you're fighting. Now granted the the MMO RPGs and stuff, all the massive online stuff, it's just other people. But when you're dealing with stuff and there is a intelligence in the application that is your opponent. Uh a lot of times we know we've seen it like you pick all of your games like the Dark Souls series of stuff. There's there's uh patterns that they do. The things that they struggle with usually is patterns with some sort of randomness to it or things like that. But that's honestly what we know. If you really look at it, if you look at a a fighter, if you look at uh a football team, if you look at um I'm trying like a fencer or things like there's certain moves u the tai chi the uh uh ultimate fighter and stuff like that. Wrestlers, there are there's moves that they use. There's certain things that they do. If you look at dancers, you can look at across the line of what humans do. There are patterns of what we do. The things that are different for those that are the best is that we add randomness to it. Is that we try not to be predictable enough so that our our opponent doesn't know which path or which sequence we're taking at any given moment. That's not that much different from what AI provides. What we're trying to do, of course, is we want AI to be consistent. However, the bonus is that like AI is not consistent partially because it doesn't have the same set of information each time we ask that question. Now, sometimes we'll ask the same question and it's close enough, but it's still going to be like there's uh I think there's percentages and stuff like that behind the scenes, not getting too deep into the eye and like and I'm trying to simplify it for like not getting into the deep of the deepness of what this is, but honestly, at the bottom line, it it does work down to like you're rolling the dice. You're throwing a you're asking a question. and you're rolling dice and says, "What things am I going to like most use to uh color my opinion on this?" And we've seen that. We've seen this in this season where we've asked effectively the same question. We've gotten slightly different results, slightly different approach, and it's based on time of day or whatever else is going on. So, I think that's very key for us to take. I think that's a a very key takeaway is AI is literally like another person is like throwing out there I think if you look at it that way but like saying hey um and Michael mentioned u using as a virtual assistant I really think before like god this is such a rabbit trail I could go down I really see uh AI as replacing the VA I see so many things that I do right now that I'm like I can throw that to AI I AI I'll do that and I could honestly this is your automation stuff is like I could build a bot that does that stuff for me and I talk to people that are like yeah the the people that are technical that are trying to leverage AI that are not just throwing random stuff at it say yeah I can spend a little bit of time and I can build some sort of an AI solution that gives me this report this dashboard this look this overview this summary this outline things that are like all they do is just get us to the solution a little bit faster. >> And I'm going to throw something to you before I like get to the end of this of this episode faster. >> Yeah. So, the last thing I want to touch on, so as you were talking, spoilers for those that have not seen Superman, the new Superman, the scene with Lex Luthther where he's literally throwing out numbers. He's basically controlling the Ultra Man character in the movie through the fight. So, it's a real time person interacting with another person for a battle. A lot of the best AI tools that are out there are still the best procedurally written applications. Basically, if then do this, if then do this. It's building upon a procedural logic. It is not AI. It is a rules-based engine that is driving where your application is going and the interaction with your customers. I have seen more often than not, especially with testing tools and since Rob's been publishing all his applications, I am probably going to get mine out there again soon. I wrote a testing application 10 years ago, a testing framework. It needs to be updated a little bit, but speaking of legacy, I spun it up the other day, ran it against a website, and it worked. So the short answer is procedurally driven applications is essentially the current form of AI. You have to ask certain questions in a certain way and AI is essentially building you a procedural response to those answers to give you a solution based on your input. everything I see for uh what is it uh SAP and all these uh marketing tools and uh business tracking tools, they are literally just freaking integration systems that are basically procedurally driven based on rules, not necessarily AI where based on customer rules, we're going to give you this generated code or this generated report. Yes, it's AIish, but it's still procedural. It is not really thinking outside the box. It's thinking within this rule engine to generate these responses, these reports, these applications. So, be very careful relying on AI as the be all end all answer to your problems. >> And that's I guess that's the bottom line. It's just like it is it's an adviser like anything else. It is not going to always be correct. Um, it is there. It is wrong at times. It makes mistakes and things like that. Just get used to that. But that doesn't mean that it's not helpful. It's just like everything else. It's like everybody else you talk to, there's going to be value in what they say and there's going to be some stuff that is not very valuable in what they say. There's a lot of value in shooting us an email at [email protected] because we will use that. We will like build that into this thing. you will find the option, the opportunity to say something to us and actually impact season topics, episodes, uh stuff that we do, if we do blog episodes, I mean maybe even training and stuff like that we do. There's a lot that you can do. If you look back, we've done a lot over the years. You go back especially to like some of our mentor classes and some of things those are all out on the YouTube developer channel uh do YouTube.com developer channel. um you'll find a lot of stuff where there were discussions that we had that ended up becoming uh entire products and things like that. So uh feedback is awesome. You can leave us feedback wherever you listen to podcasts. You can check us out on YouTube. You can check us out at X. Uh we are developer Facebook. There's a developer page uh Facebook page. You can leave us comments anywhere on the developer.com site which is going to be in the months ahead uh updating and enhancing and we're going to do some cool new stuff. Uh I I assume cool. We'll see how cool it is when I get to that. But I will just say I was very happy with some of the things we changes we made on the RB consulting site. I very much expect to bring some of that stuff forward and do even more on the developer site plus some other side projects I've got going that will sort of feed into be like a little feedback loop for these kinds of things. So, uh, we're not done. We're not just giving you content. We're going to find better ways to bring you content and bring you, uh, the stuff that you need, but it also helps to give us feedback so that we can, you know, know what we've done correctly and where we need to do it better. That being said, I just want to say once again, as we are probably wrapping up this season, I'm guessing that our next episode, we will just dive right into whatever our new ep or new season is, which in recent seasons is sort of what we do is we're like, I don't know. We'll figure it out when we get there. And uh it's turned out pretty cool so far. We've gotten a lot of stuff. We've learned a lot. Hopefully shared a lot that has been valuable to you. Appreciate you so much and the time that you've given us. As always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great way, great week, and we will come back to you next time with season 26. Oh my gosh, this is just insane. Have a good one, folks. Talk to you later. Oops, I didn't want to do that. bonus material. >> Well, do we need bonus for this one? Because this was the end. >> I don't know that we do. I think we like we we talked a little bit beforehand. So, I think we're in pretty good shape. So, we can sort of wrap this one up. We can go on to >> our lives. Uh we will come back. Uh you and I can discuss or maybe we'll discuss at the start of the next episode what that season's going to be. Um I will I've got this stuff off in a folder so we can take a look at it. Um >> enabled screen reader. >> Wow, somebody hit a screen reader somewhere. Was that me? >> No, I hit I really do not like this new OS. I hit a button, all of a sudden things started popping up and uh >> I hate when that happens. >> The update it. This liquid glass thing is weird. >> It's going to take some getting used to. Uh let's see. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm like my This is why I put do not disturb. Stuff starts popping up popping up on my screen. So, it's like, "Dad, damn it." I hate when that happens. Well, >> that's what happened. Mine just ended. So, things started popping up. >> That's exactly what I'm getting. I'm getting like all this stuff. It's like, I don't need all of that. H. All right. That being said, thank you all you guys for yet another season. It I cannot appreciate. It's like share enough of my appreciation. Literally, if you guys ever need any help, if there's anything that we can do, if there's any way we can help you, check us out. Uh, shoot me an email [email protected]. Shoot me an email, robb-sns.com. Uh, go out to the the matrix.rb-sns.com. Feel free to check that out. It is it is free. All it is is an email. We'll just send you emails to say, hey, how you doing? You can uh, you know, always just say, I don't want to be a part of this mailing list. You can jump back out. It's it's literally free. And hopefully it's helpful to you. I would love feedback on all that. love feedback on anything we have done because we are going into a season. We're getting towards the end of the year right now going into the fourth quarter. By now you probably know that fourth quarter is when I really start like evaluating the year behind and looking at what I want to do in the year ahead. That is one of the things that we do. It's one of the things that I do personally. I would love feedback of any sort, suggestions, recommendations, all that kind of stuff because this is going to help us really do more for you in the year ahead. Uh, we appreciate you much. We want to do the most that we can for you. Thank you. I'm going to let you have the rest of your time off. Go have yourself a good one and we will see you next season. [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
All right, I'm not even going to go to
AI for this last for our summary.
We're going to dive right into it and
just
riff a little bit about like what did we
what did we learn? uh what did we get
out of this season with AI? Probably
some like, you know, pros and cons and
things like that and be a little more
um probably conversational and things
like that, but I think it'll be
something that'll be hopefully it'll be
a good um
you know, have us give us give us an
excuse to sort of think back about like
what we've gotten out of AI and maybe
even talk a little bit about AI in
general. So that's my thoughts.
>> I like it. Um, we really only use chat
tpt and co-pilot, right? We didn't
really touch on or was it?
>> No, we used uh Gemini.
>> Okay.
>> We used that like a couple of times
mostly just to try it out. We did bounce
between chat GPT five and four. Um, I
don't know how often I actually
specified which was which because I
wasn't even sure sometimes because it
was using like best u whatever's the you
know most effective engine at the time.
I just keep it sort of left. I keep it
open and just do that kind of stuff. So,
um
>> yeah, I've had to play around with five
lately because I've been getting some
weird answers on the general one. Um
I've gone to like the thinking one and
it will actually give me a better
answer. Like it takes more time, but I
I'm not liking five. And I tried to go
back to 40 and 40 is now um you can use
it. It's limited. So, you can only use
40 a little bit unless you pay for the
professional version. And I'm like, "Oh,
that's crap." Because,
>> yeah, I went to the pro because I was
just using it so much. And I use the
thinking version a lot because I'm
usually doing it to say like a lot of
I've been doing a lot of it to
like migrate code and also to do like
design things and stuff like that where
I'll be like especially like that. Like
I said, the RB site, I got a lot of
stuff out of that where I'd be like,
take this
add these things to it, move this
around, do that thing. It's all the
stuff that like it's it's a little slow,
you know, it takes a couple, you know,
minute to think about it or whatever,
but it's so much faster than me like
going through and like, okay, can I
tweak this? Got to tweak this, got to
move that, got to move that. It's like
all those little things, it gets me
there faster. And so I'm like, yeah,
because and it's stuff that I'm like, I
have no desire to learn how to like
totally figure out this, you know, how
to do this in Bootstrap or how to do
that in Tailwind. And so it's been
>> really cool. It's allowed me to do
updates to interfaces really fast. It's
allowed me to even do some uh some
coding, some like swagger stuff and
things like that. It's like here, this
API, go in and just like give me a
better set of comments and stuff like
that. Now I've got more to work with. I
can go in, tweak it, boom, done. So
speed,
>> that's a lot of what I use it for. Um I
know you get on me sometimes because
you're like, "Oh, that's very AIish."
But sometimes when you're just dealing
with boilerplate stuff or you just need
a quick, hey, just give me a quick strut
or, you know, foundation for the
project. I'd rather do that and spend my
time working on the actual code and
yeah, I'll come back and tweak it later,
but if it works, it works. It's that
8020 thing. It's like, is it working?
Yeah. Okay, move on. Um
>> it is. It's just sometimes the code it
generates is oh my gosh. So like
>> and I do sometimes I get it but
sometimes it's speed. It's like
>> when when you're it depends where you
are in the project. If you're at the
point where results matter more than
quality you kind of got it's one of
those trade-offs. It it's a balance you
got to juggle. But um just teeny nitpick
and then we can jump in. Um, check your
um, what is it? Above the fold uh, your
image scroller on RB. One of your images
is jacking up your whole page. Like when
it scrolls it, the page is messed up
till it scrolls again. Um,
>> the RB site.
>> Yeah,
>> there aren't any. I don't think there's
any.
>> It may be on the blog because when I did
like the RB, it took me to the blog
page.
is it whatever page you have that has
like images that scroll the page got
jacked up from it and then it fixed
itself but it was weird.
>> Um that's interesting because there
shouldn't be thing left.
>> It might have been something cached but
I went to rbsns.com rblog. It does a
little shake and then it did like a
shift to an a new image and then the
whole top of the page was jacked for a
second till it switched back and then it
was fine. So you have something cached
in
um Cloud.
>> If you have something cached, there's
not much.
>> No, no. I mean, but if you're using
Cloudflare, you may need to go out there
and flush the cache and have it reach
your page because it was weird. Like I
said, it was very strange. Once it fix
itself, it was fine. But it the first
time I hit the page, it was very weird.
It it it was like, "Hey, it looks nice."
and all a sudden, whoop, you got this
big image of your icon of your logo,
then went back to the regular image.
>> Yeah, I think what it is is that Yeah.
Some because there because it's
a little bit behind the uh inside
baseball is basically what I do is I've
got like it's it was originally
has been forever a WordPress site and I
had a nice little theme and I like once
I started really messing with the theme,
I'm like no, I'm like I'm going to
override the theme. I'm just going to
break out of the theme. So now I've
basically I've done what I can to pull
RB back to be um so that everything runs
through now it's essentially my custom
pages, my custom theme, my
>> piece and then all I do is I use the I'm
trying to use WordPress as just a a
headless post producer and stuff like
that. Um, I'm half tempted to even yank
some of that stuff out. But there are
still ways you can get back once you're
back into like the actual WordPress
engine. Then there's some older stuff
that it's just like I'm not going to try
to like I'm trying to figure out how to
block all that so that it never goes
there. So everything comes back and it's
using even whatever image or whatever
post you're seeing and stuff like that.
So that's probably what it is is you can
get you like I just I was poking around
poking around and I was able to get back
to the old homepage. Yeah. And it's it's
not awesome. Um it doesn't still it
doesn't have rotating images anywhere.
So I'm not sure what it did, but um and
it's I I think that's the one I recently
had because it's not on Cloudflare. I
don't think Developer is, but uh RB I
yanked it off that years ago.
>> Okay. It's causing me all kinds of
issues. But good to know. I'll see if I
can find on my list. Um, if you have any
caching plugins, see if you can clear
the cache on them and have it reach
because that I had that issue with
Doctor Who. Uh, I had like the WP cache,
which was great because I didn't update
the site too often, but when they did, I
had to go clear that because it's like,
oh, I don't see your code changes. So,
anyway, I was not trying to nitpick.
It's just it was very strange how it
happened. And I'm like, I'll just point
it out because you were mentioning you
were working on I just didn't know if
you'd seen it.
>> Yeah, I need to go. That's still
something that's like now pretty low on
my uh priority is to go back and try to
figure out where anywhere that it goes
to um a WordPress article or page is to
make sure that it's got all of my
wrapped stuff. So, it's the new look and
feel. Um, I just haven't like chased all
that crap down because then it's
starting part of me is like I almost
want to just rip out the existing theme
completely and then build a custom theme
that does all this. It's just I haven't
gotten there yet. I that's actually what
I'm going to do I think with developor
is I think I'm just going to create a
custom theme and just use that and and
build it from there as opposed to um
what I've done with RB where I was
trying to sort of keep it up while I was
going because there's like I've made as
you probably noticed like if you go to
the main RB SNS page it's dramatically
different than it was um and a lot of
the stuff the links the information
that's in there all that kind of good
stuff um I've been going through and
putts with that. Um, yeah. So, cool
stuff. Good to know. And that leaves us
with I think it's time for us to dive
right in for this last potentially last
episode. We'll do a little three, two,
Oops. Let me get this up. So, I'm
looking at what I want to look at.
Uh, we do this. Let me move this over
here. Oops. I don't want you there.
Um, let me try this. If I do this and
move you here.
Dad, come. Uh, it doesn't work the same
when I've got multiple.
Let me take this and move this over
here.
There we go. Okay.
I tell you, when you got like multiple
virtual screens, it gets really confused
really fast. So all right, three, two,
hello and welcome back. We are
continuing and potentially wrapping up
yet another season with developer
building better developers. I am Rob
Broadhead, one of the founders of the
pre-mentioned developer and building
better developers. Also the founder of
RB Consulting where we are boutique
consulting. We are a fractional CIO.
Bottom line, we help businesses assess
and simplify their technology. We figure
out a way to walk through with you what
you've got and how to leverage it so
that there is a roadmap for success for
moving forward for growth for your
company. Bottom line, it really comes
back down to we assess where we're at.
Help you build a roadmap. Let's get you
to a better, brighter future.
Essentially, we do that through
simplification, integration, automation,
innovation. There's a lot of different
ways that we can utilize technology that
you can utilize technology, but also
that we can utilize it, help you do it
better. That's what we're here for. We
help you craft a specific recipe for you
custom to your business. We sit down and
we connect your business goals and where
you're at with where you want to be and
how to get you there in the best and
brightest future that you have ahead of
you. Good things and bad things. Oh,
actually, I guess I would be aiss if I
didn't mention rb-sns.com. You can check
out our website which has been we were
just talking in the pre-show about like
it has been evolving. We've been working
on it. We've been doing a lot of cool
stuff. Uh we like it. Give us feedback.
We'd love to hear how you like it. Uh
robbs.com.
Uh also check out our tool
matrix.rbs.com.
It's really a cool way for you to get
quickly to a road map of sorts. Uh it's
not quite as custom, but it's one of
those that definitely based on where
you're at can help you figure out what
your next steps are. And it's free. You
just go in there, sign up, answer a few
questions. I think it takes about 10
minutes, something like that, depending
on where you're at. It's a little bit
technical, but it will help your
business get to the brighter future or
at least give you the steps to do so.
Back into good thing, bad thing.
Good thing is uh we are wrapping up yet
another season. We are This is like It
really I can't tell you how much it is
just heartwarming. how much it is like,
you know, the endorphins and all that
cool stuff. Getting through another
season when you started way way back
episode one and you weren't sure you
were going to get through any episodes.
You weren't sure how far you were going
to go. You weren't how far this was
going to last. And the fact that we are
just like marching into now what I think
26 is going to be our next season. Uh
that's a lot of seasons. It's way beyond
what a lot of people do.
Sometimes you have to mute your mic when
you have a
sneeze or two. Apologies for that.
Uh the bad thing is that we are through
another season. Um it is it is always a
little bit of a challenge too to figure
out like what are we going to do next?
It's sort of funny that this has been a
challenge that we have now faced
multiple times like where do we go next?
What do we do? What's our next topic?
One of the things we may discuss is
actually going out to AI and saying,
"Hey, where's an area that we haven't
covered?" We've done that. We actually
got some pretty cool little uh
information back. If you check out the
YouTube channel, you'll be able to check
out part of that bonus material. But
first, I think I need my co-host to
introduce himself. Go for it. Hey
everyone, my name is Michael Malash. I'm
one of the co-founders and developer
building better developers. I'm also the
owner of Envision QA where we help
businesses take back control with their
customer with custom software that
builts around the needs uh not the other
way around. So our focus is simple,
great service, great solutions and a
rockolid quality. We build tools that
replace frustrating systems, streamline
operations, and are fully tested to work
right the first time. At Envision QA, we
combine development and quality
assurance to give you software that you
can trust and support you can count on.
Check us out at envisionqa.com.
Uh, good thing, bad thing. Uh, so good
thing, uh, I guess it's mixed, good and
bad. So, I'm another year older, another
year closer to the 50 mark. Um, not
quite there yet, almost. Um, and I'm
having to reflect on a lot of things and
update all my freaking policies and
things like that. So, you know, as you
get older, you have to worry about
things like mortgages, health insurance,
life insurance, and well, I just got
dinged by or pinged by my mortgage
broker. It's like, oh, interest rates
are going down again. You know, do you
want to refinance? And it's like, do I
uh how long do I have to retirement? it.
These are questions I don't want to ask
yet.
But anyway, um so that's kind of the
good and bad. Another year older, had a
wonderful birthday, but more crap to go
with it.
Mute.
Here's to one year older
and not realizing when you've actually
turned your little mic off. Apologies to
that. Um, yeah, I wish I was getting
closer to 50, but I'm getting closer to
150. So, that's just sort of how these
things go. But more importantly, we're
wrapping up this season. We have spent
another 30 plus episodes talking about
building better developers. This time,
we did it with AI. And what we want to
do in this uh this wrapup instead of and
we can I mean this is we'll see where
Michael wants to go but I I want to
spend a little more time like uh in a
meta retrospective a little bit of like
look at this is what we did when we came
into this was said hey
AI is a big thing right now everybody's
talking AI AI AI AI people that can't
spell AI are talking about AI I had a
conversation today and it's like with a
guy
they're in this area, they really need
AI and they've like all these people are
experts because they've done like three
things. There are very few people that
have spent more than I don't know 3 to
six months probably playing around with
AI. Most of them wrote a chatbot and
it's really about like okay great
everybody can spell it, we'll say, and
then thinks they're an expert, but let's
really talk about like how do we use it?
How do we utilize it? And during this
season and a little bit before, but
definitely during this season, I it it
really has been a journey on what does
AI provide us? Where can it help us? And
where do we need to still like make some
progress? And I would just like in this
uh I don't know this summary, this
little retrospective, just look back.
It's like it really has been um it's
been nice as being like a third host,
you know, another co-host in it that
it's really brought although it has
definitely touched on things that we
touched on which is probably for the
same kind of reasons because when you
have a certain topic in a well-known
field like this, there's there's like
there's it's a target-rich environment.
There are a lot of things that you can
talk about where you're like, "Oh, yeah,
that makes sense and that makes sense
and that makes sense and this is
probably shift mission." You know, it's
like uh when we started way way back,
there's things like we talk about the
software development life cycle, there's
certain things you're always going to
talk about with the software development
life cycle. If you talk about agile,
there's certain things you're going to
talk about. If you talk about scrum,
certain things you're going to talk
about. Software development in general,
there's like certain areas like, you
know, you're going to talk about code,
you're going to talk about databases,
you're going to talk about quality
assurance, you're all of these things.
And AI is really good about that. But
what we've seen is that it's really good
about touching on additional areas. It's
it really is. It's another set of eyes,
another set of ears to say, well, hey,
have you thought about that? And I think
that has been a a big boon going through
this season is that there have been some
areas where we didn't really connect it
and sometimes where it misunderstood,
we'll say, where it took it a little bit
different direction, but I think we got
some great uh conversations out of that.
So, I'll pause there and and get your
like, you know, initial thoughts.
>> Yeah. So, I I I I think I don't remember
which one was initially kicked off the
idea of, "Hey, let's like revisit a past
season with AI." Uh, but it became an
interesting journey. Initially, we're
like, "Oh, well, let's just see what it
can do." And, um, we'll just go with it.
And
as we went with it, it really
did a decent job of analyzing what we
talked about. In some cases, it was
completely different, but in a good way
where it's like, oh, we didn't even
think about that. And it gave us more
ideas
um to kind of expand upon past episodes.
Uh, one of the best things I can I guess
compare it to is it's like um throwing
ideas at a whiteboard, seeing what will
stick and AI was great for that based on
the way we used it. Now,
would it be great to actually flush out
the content for the full episodes? I
don't think so. I think we'd get into
that kind of false fake um or not fake
but just where it would just kind of
give us an answer but not really be an
answer uh for a lot of these solutions.
So for something a little higher level u
like summaries and outlines and things
like that I think it did a great job
this season.
>> I think so too. I think that's a really
good point is that it gives us um
yes, we can get some very good details
if we want to out of AI, but for
something like this, it's much better at
a at a high level, at a summary kind of
level. It was sort of like, hey, here's
an outline or something like that and
let us take it from there. Um there were
more than a couple times that I think it
came back with some stuff where it was
just like, huh, that's an interesting
way to go. We don't want to go there.
you know, like it would take the it
didn't have the right context of the
term or the topic or things like that.
So, it did um it could get lost, but
honestly, so can we. There are times
that we would put together a topic and
we would go in very different directions
because we were thinking different
things. So, I don't think that's a I
don't know that's necessarily a knock
against AI, but I think it is a uh a
caution against AI.
>> No, agreed. I mean, it it gives you a
good
it's good at giving you content, but
it's not necessarily good at giving you
the meat of what it is that you're
trying to convey.
>> Yeah. And I think that's this goes back
to like some of the other things I've
done with AI that are outside of the the
developer real world, which actually
we'll see some of this as we like part
of the things I'm going to be doing when
I'm revamping the website. It's
basically a lot of it is like take this
stuff, take this bucket of stuff and
reorganize it. It's like it's sometimes
it's not much different than like just
shuffle this around, but sometimes the
shuffling makes a big difference. It's
just like AB testing where you're like,
well, what if I put the button at the
top versus the bottom versus the left or
the right or things like that. Um,
that's some of what it is. It's
basically like say okay let's take this
and let's take honestly in some cases um
you know like best practices or
standards or things like that and let's
like apply that to this thing so that we
can get something done
um that
maintains the meat of it but also
dresses it up a little bit. And it's it
is sort of a um gosh it's so it's really
at the end of the day the things that
work best are the ones that are
processoriented are the things that are
like there's always a series of steps
that you want to get through. Um I will
share which is there's a lot more to go
into it but I will share that like one
of the things we've done that I found
has been really good is using it as a um
an advisor of sorts. like we we wanted
to plan trips and would throw questions
at it and it would be able to go like
gather a lot of information and say well
particularly in cases where you're
trying to figure out like you're going
into new areas of research. Uh it is a
great way to very quickly figure out
that like this is a good path or this
isn't a good path. Um, I've used it a
lot since we've started into this, I
think, since this season of things like
saying like if I want to build an app
from scratch
in this realm and this is sort of the
target audience and this is what I want
it to look like, what are the best
technologies for it? And it will give me
stuff like, well, here's here's an
example. here's the the popular
technology or here's the technology
that's going to take more time to learn
but it's actually going to be a better
long term. Uh those things are, you
know, it can get you there, but it
really does come down to it's people
talk about like I had a chat with chat
GPT. It really is, I think, uh where you
need to go is it has to be about
a chat. It has to be about you learning
how to use AI as much as AI giving you
that information.
>> Yeah. I mean, for those of us that have
been around for a while, it goes back to
like the old uh dictation software,
Dragon, Naturally Speak, you have to
spend time
teaching the tool that you're using how
to interact with you. You're not just
learning the tool, but the tool is
learning how to interact with you, how
to understand your sentence structure,
your grammar, uh your reflections. A lot
of times, it's interesting because when
I first started with Chat GPT, I'm a bad
speller.
It would more or less at early on just
correct my spelling and say, "Did you
mean this?"
Now it takes almost anything I throw at
it and it returns some type of message.
Now it may not be the correct response
but it is a response based on the
history of the interactions with the
tool. So if I were to log in anonymously
through chat GPT. So this is a good test
for those of you that have a chat GPT
account.
If you use chat GPT all the time, log
out, clear your browser cache or go
incognito, log into chat GPT or don't
log into chat GPT, but just go to chat
GPT and start using it. You're going to
get different responses and different
interactions. You're going to find that
either it's going to send you down a
different path or it's not going to give
you that kind of personal experience
that you're used to from being logged
in. So, these are just some of the
things to be cautious of as you continue
to learn and grow with the tools. It
takes time and you need to question it.
Even if you're just starting out, heck,
I would ask it almost uh when once I
started like building projects like Rob
was just talking about like with code, I
start out with, okay, I want to build a
web page. So, give me a web page. I'm
like, is this the best way to build the
web page? Yeah. Okay. Well, all right.
maybe we'll do this. And I'm like, all
right. And then it would prompt me,
well, who's the web page for? So, if you
are asking the right prompt, it will
prompt you back if it's not getting what
it needs. Uh, now with 50, I'm not sure
if it still does that. I would have to
go back and retest that, but I would
probably have to retest it in cognito
because I've already gone through that
learning process with Chat GPT. So,
as you're learning the tool, the tool is
learning you. And it just takes time. Be
patient with it, but definitely spend
time with it and work through it. If you
question it, Google it and call it out
if it's wrong.
And I think that's
that's really I think the context is so
critical. Um, and it it goes back to it
reminds me of Google food ability
people's ability to write searches in
Google to like get useful information
back and it AI is so much like that is
it really is and I I was thinking about
this today as I was like I was having a
chat with chat GPT and I was actually
getting it to do some work for me and I
knew I knew I knew I knew I was like I
really am gonna I like it was one of
these that I asked asked it to do
something and then I had to ask it for
something else and I wanted to go back
to the not the prior but two prior and I
was like if I don't ask this right it's
going to go to one prior and not two
prior and sure enough it did and it's
really is it's like it's
I like sometimes I like joke that it's
like talking with the child that like
has a very short attention span that you
have to like make sure you're very clear
on what you provide. I do think as
Michael's mentioned like the folders and
stuff like that, there are some things
that it does allow it now to do a better
job of keeping context, but
so often uh it still will like wander
off. And so it's things where I have to
and it's where it actually does become
worth it to have like the paid version.
So you can have a bigger question where
you can say, "Okay, based on this, I
want you to do this and make it look
like that." And it's like sometimes
that's a decent amount of stuff that you
need to work with. The cool thing in
building a better developer and then I'm
going to let you jump in on this is that
the best way to get that kind of
information is be dealing with small
chunks. And this goes back to something
we have often said is like try to break
your problem that you're solving down
into small chunks that are very easy
then to work with and maintain. And this
will also help you immensely when you
get into AI. You had a thought so I want
you to jump back.
>> I did. Um, so you you made a comment
that when working with check GPT, if
you're like two or three uh chats down
and you need to go back and it doesn't
go back to the right one, a small tip I
found with this is if you go copy the
selection you want to go back to,
repaste it, but start out with reset the
conversation to this uh chat, paste your
chat in. Sometimes it will reset
everything to where you need to be and
then you can continue your thread from
there. Um, I found that to be more
successful than just assuming it knows
where to go back to. That's I actually
had a conversation with a guy u not too
long ago that's a AI maven or whatever
but that was some that was one of the
things that he we talked about in our
conversation is how it's it has a very
limited memory and so there it's very
easy five or six requests we'll say into
it to suddenly lose stuff and it just
like it's sort of reset and he said that
was something that was he was struggling
with as he was building out longer term
conversations in that is to be able to
do it. And I think that's honestly, and
this is like a little pro tip or
whatever because this is something I've
been working with. Um, I think there's a
point where what you need to do is if
you're building like chat bots and stuff
like that for longer term conversations
is to have ways to actually freeze and
update the context. is very much this is
very a very much a Python thing but uh
very much when in Python where you if
you use pip if you use their library and
there's other things are like this but
there's a way to like say freeze like
use what I have right now give me a
script so that in the future I can go
back and then just and this is called
requirements basically but I can use
those requirements and I can suck all
those in and say I want exactly this
environment I want these libraries these
versions that the kind that is literally
the kind of stuff that we need with AI.
And if you're building something that is
an evolving AI,
I think you need to do that. But you
because AI has a it has a crap memory.
It's worse than mine. And so what you
need to do is you need to be able to do
something where if you really are
building this isn't like the chat tools.
If you're building a chat tool, you're
going to need to be able to do a
feedback loop into that to say, "Okay,
now we have knowledge that we want to
like maintain and we want to push that
back into the AI so that now the AI is
keeping that as part of it. It's like
this is what I know." It's just like if
you go to like notebook LM where it's
like load these documents in. It's like
well I need to have those documents
there. Those are the thing. It's like
marking knowledge that is key knowledge.
And honestly, it's funny because Michael
and I have had conversations in business
stuff outside of developer in recent
days, weeks, months where there are
things like that that I I realize I
recognize now that is very much a part
of the human conversation as well.
You'll be like, "Hey, this is a a
watershed moment or a milestone or
something a marker that we want to say
we have agreed on this. This is what
requirements documents are all about
really. We've agreed on this
and so this is what we're going to use
as our foundation moving forward. It's
literally no different when you're
dealing with AI other than AI is a
little more obnoxious than I know a lot
of obnoxious people. I'm not even going
to say it's more obnoxious than people.
But I think that's what we we didn't
embrace in this season is that we didn't
feed back into it. every time we asked
it about a a season about a topic for
and give us a couple of things to talk
about, we didn't actually give it
feedback on it. So that is I think why
we found over and over again we got
roughly the same response. It got I mean
we we asked a question a little bit
differently but generally speaking we
got the same response because we're
asking the same thing over and over.
>> Yeah. Uh so one of the things
as you went through that that kept
coming to my mind is
there are some tips and tricks you can
do with AI and this may be
more application desktop application
version of AI versus web but I have
found as I go through the process of
working with AI and resetting AI if it
gives me a response there is that little
check box that you can check under the
message. Hey, this is right. But what I
have found to be more useful is if it
gives me, hey, this is like exactly what
I want. I respond, save this into
memory. This is a good response.
And for those that are not, I say, okay,
this was a poor response.
Reject this, but do not follow this
path. And if I do that, I get better
results in the long run. But if I don't
do that and I just let it keep
regurgitating stuff,
you take kind of that long way to get
there. Like it it it takes longer to get
to the solution than where you tell
literally tell, hey, bad bad bad go
back. Here's a cookie. That's right.
Here's a cookie. That's good. But
>> I have to interrupt because this is you
and I have this conversation. I'm like,
"Okay, time out. Stop right there. Let's
Let's I don't say snapshot, but it's
basically, "Let's snapshot that. Can we
agree?" And we can move on. I know I've
done that with you. I've done that with
a lot of people. I will say because she
probably won't hear this. My wife gets
really annoyed when I do that sometimes
because I will cut her off in the middle
of a sentence and be like, "Stop right
there. That's a point. Let's move on
from there." But that is a I'm going to
let you go because that is really a very
important insight into how you find ways
to move AI forward instead of get into
those like loops or let it spin off into
space.
>> Exactly. And worst case scenario, if you
find yourself five or six messages into
a thread, even after trying to get it
corrected, stop. Create a new chat.
Delete. Do not archive. Delete the old
chat. Say before you delete it, say this
was a bad message thread. Delete it from
memory. Then delete it. Start a new
thread. Nine out of 10 times I find that
the new thread starts in a different
path. Usually closer to what I want and
it gets me there quicker.
These are not things that happen
overnight. Uh, a lot of times I can now
jump on the chat GPT probably within
about 5 10 minutes I get enough of what
I need from it to go do what I'm trying
to do or I get enough of a correction to
like a document, an email or something
that I can just jump in and go take it
from there and move on.
I use track GPT now more days as a good
virtual assistant and a quick
boilerplate like code generator like
here just throw this out here and I can
go from there.
Sometimes it works well for more complex
things
but I'm still struggling with most of
the chat bots to get something that will
build me an enterprise solution. And I I
only want to touch on this one other
thing cuz I read an article on this just
recently. It seems like more Seale
Fortune 500 companies are actually now
starting to shift away from AI a little
bit because they're finding that it's
costing more to get to that chatbot
level of maybe this is right to
something that is actually going to help
the customer.
And that's honestly that's the wave
we've seen in technology from forever is
it's like everybody like oh this is now
finally the silver bullet. This is the
thing that's going to solve all our
problems and then everybody throws a lot
of money at it and the next thing we
know it's like oh no it's not solving
our problems. I'm just going to say if
it's just throwing a lot of money at it
you're not you're not paying attention.
Throwing a lot of money is not it.
You've got to be there has to be wisdom
in that. You can throw good money after
bad all day long. Uh AI is no different
from all of the other silver bullets
that we've seen all the way back to like
I when I started out it was things like
UIs and object-oriented and things like
that actually AI I did a class I was
just talking again guya today I had a
class 35 years ago on AI it was
basically expert systems in artificial
intelligence and how to do that
way and things have evolved um massively
since then. But the interesting thing is
which is actually a really cool little
observation. This guy came out of the
gaming environ the gaming world and he
had dealt with a lot of stuff there.
There is a lot of AI built into games,
the gaming world of stuff. Like think
about it like if you're sitting there
and you're fighting. Now granted the the
MMO RPGs and stuff, all the massive
online stuff, it's just other people.
But when you're dealing with stuff and
there is a intelligence in the
application that is your opponent.
Uh a lot of times we know we've seen it
like you pick all of your games like the
Dark Souls series of stuff. There's
there's uh patterns that they do. The
things that they struggle with usually
is patterns with some sort of randomness
to it or things like that. But that's
honestly what we know. If you really
look at it, if you look at a a fighter,
if you look at uh a football team, if
you look at um I'm trying like a fencer
or things like there's certain moves u
the tai chi the uh
uh ultimate fighter and stuff like that.
Wrestlers, there are there's moves that
they use. There's certain things that
they do. If you look at dancers, you can
look at across the line of what humans
do. There are patterns of what we do.
The things that are different for those
that are the best is that we add
randomness to it. Is that we try not to
be predictable enough so that our our
opponent doesn't know which path or
which sequence we're taking at any given
moment.
That's not that much different from what
AI provides. What we're trying to do, of
course, is we want AI to be consistent.
However,
the bonus is that like AI is not
consistent partially because it doesn't
have the same set of information each
time we ask that question. Now,
sometimes we'll ask the same question
and it's close enough, but it's still
going to be like there's uh I think
there's percentages and stuff like that
behind the scenes, not getting too deep
into the eye and like and I'm trying to
simplify it for like not getting into
the deep of the deepness of what this
is, but honestly, at the bottom line, it
it does work down to like you're rolling
the dice. You're throwing a you're
asking a question. and you're rolling
dice and says, "What things am I going
to like most use to uh color my opinion
on this?" And we've seen that. We've
seen this in this season where we've
asked effectively the same question.
We've gotten slightly different results,
slightly different approach, and it's
based on time of day or whatever else is
going on. So, I think that's very key
for us to take. I think that's a a very
key takeaway is
AI is literally like another person is
like throwing out there I think if you
look at it that way but like saying hey
um and Michael mentioned u using as a
virtual assistant I really think before
like god this is such a rabbit trail I
could go down I really see uh AI as
replacing the VA I see so many things
that I do right now that I'm like I can
throw that to AI I AI I'll do that and I
could honestly this is your automation
stuff is like I could build a bot that
does that stuff for me and I talk to
people that are like yeah the the people
that are technical that are trying to
leverage AI that are not just throwing
random stuff at it say yeah I can spend
a little bit of time and I can build
some sort of an AI solution that gives
me this report this dashboard this look
this overview this summary this outline
things that are like all they do is just
get us to the solution a little bit
faster.
>> And I'm going to throw something to you
before I like get to the end of this of
this episode faster.
>> Yeah. So, the last thing I want to touch
on, so
as you were talking, spoilers for those
that have not seen Superman, the new
Superman,
the scene with Lex Luthther
where he's literally throwing out
numbers. He's basically controlling the
Ultra Man character in the movie through
the fight. So, it's a real time person
interacting with another person for a
battle. A lot of the best AI tools that
are out there are still the best
procedurally written applications.
Basically, if then do this, if then do
this. It's building upon a procedural
logic. It is not AI. It is a rules-based
engine that is driving
where your application is going and the
interaction with your customers.
I have seen more often than not,
especially with testing tools and since
Rob's been publishing all his
applications, I am probably going to get
mine out there again soon. I wrote a
testing application 10 years ago, a
testing framework. It needs to be
updated a little bit, but speaking of
legacy, I spun it up the other day, ran
it against a website, and it worked. So
the short
answer is
procedurally driven applications is
essentially the current form of AI. You
have to ask certain questions in a
certain way and AI is essentially
building you a procedural response to
those answers to give you a solution
based on your input.
everything I see for uh what is it uh
SAP and all these uh marketing tools and
uh business tracking tools, they are
literally just freaking integration
systems that are basically procedurally
driven based on rules, not necessarily
AI where based on customer rules, we're
going to give you this generated code or
this generated report. Yes, it's AIish,
but it's still procedural. It is not
really thinking outside the box. It's
thinking within this rule engine to
generate these responses, these reports,
these applications. So, be very careful
relying on AI as the be all end all
answer to your problems.
>> And that's I guess that's the bottom
line. It's just like it is it's an
adviser like anything else. It is not
going to always be correct. Um, it is
there. It is wrong at times. It makes
mistakes and things like that. Just get
used to that. But that doesn't mean that
it's not helpful. It's just like
everything else. It's like everybody
else you talk to, there's going to be
value in what they say and there's going
to be some stuff that is not very
valuable in what they say. There's a lot
of value in shooting us an email at
because we will use that. We will like
build that into this thing. you will
find the option, the opportunity to say
something to us and actually impact
season topics, episodes, uh stuff that
we do, if we do blog episodes, I mean
maybe even training and stuff like that
we do. There's a lot that you can do. If
you look back, we've done a lot over the
years. You go back especially to like
some of our mentor classes and some of
things those are all out on the YouTube
developer channel uh do YouTube.com
developer channel. um you'll find a lot
of stuff where there were discussions
that we had that ended up becoming uh
entire products and things like that. So
uh feedback is awesome. You can leave us
feedback wherever you listen to
podcasts. You can check us out on
YouTube. You can check us out at X. Uh
we are developer Facebook. There's a
developer page uh Facebook page. You can
leave us comments anywhere on the
developer.com site which is going to be
in the months ahead uh updating and
enhancing and we're going to do some
cool new stuff. Uh I I assume cool.
We'll see how cool it is when I get to
that. But I will just say I was very
happy with some of the things we changes
we made on the RB consulting site. I
very much expect to bring some of that
stuff forward and do even more on the
developer site plus some other side
projects I've got going that will sort
of feed into be like a little feedback
loop for these kinds of things. So, uh,
we're not done. We're not just giving
you content. We're going to find better
ways to bring you content and bring you,
uh, the stuff that you need, but it also
helps to give us feedback so that we
can, you know, know what we've done
correctly and where we need to do it
better. That being said, I just want to
say once again, as we are probably
wrapping up this season, I'm guessing
that our next episode, we will just dive
right into whatever our new ep or new
season is, which in recent seasons is
sort of what we do is we're like, I
don't know. We'll figure it out when we
get there. And uh it's turned out pretty
cool so far. We've gotten a lot of
stuff. We've learned a lot. Hopefully
shared a lot that has been valuable to
you. Appreciate you so much and the time
that you've given us. As always, go out
there and have yourself a great day, a
great way, great week, and we will come
back to you next time with season 26.
Oh my gosh, this is just insane. Have a
good one, folks. Talk to you later.
Oops, I didn't want to do that. bonus
material.
>> Well, do we need bonus for this one?
Because this was the end.
>> I don't know that we do. I think we like
we we talked a little bit beforehand.
So, I think we're in pretty good shape.
So, we can sort of wrap this one up. We
can go on to
>> our lives. Uh we will come back. Uh you
and I can discuss or maybe we'll discuss
at the start of the next episode what
that season's going to be. Um I will
I've got this stuff off in a folder so
we can take a look at it. Um
>> enabled screen reader.
>> Wow, somebody hit a screen reader
somewhere. Was that me?
>> No, I hit I really do not like this new
OS.
I hit a button, all of a sudden things
started popping up and uh
>> I hate when that happens.
>> The update it. This liquid glass thing
is weird.
>> It's going to take some getting used to.
Uh let's see. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm like my
This is why I put do not disturb. Stuff
starts popping up popping up on my
screen. So, it's like, "Dad, damn it." I
hate when that happens. Well,
>> that's what happened. Mine just ended.
So, things started popping up.
>> That's exactly what I'm getting. I'm
getting like all this stuff. It's like,
I don't need all of that. H. All right.
That being said, thank you all you guys
for yet another season. It
I cannot appreciate. It's like share
enough of my appreciation. Literally, if
you guys ever need any help, if there's
anything that we can do, if there's any
way we can help you, check us out. Uh,
shoot me an email [email protected].
Shoot me an email, robb-sns.com.
Uh, go out to the the matrix.rb-sns.com.
Feel free to check that out. It is it is
free. All it is is an email. We'll just
send you emails to say, hey, how you
doing? You can uh, you know, always just
say, I don't want to be a part of this
mailing list. You can jump back out.
It's it's literally free. And hopefully
it's helpful to you. I would love
feedback on all that. love feedback on
anything we have done because we are
going into a season. We're getting
towards the end of the year right now
going into the fourth quarter. By now
you probably know that fourth quarter is
when I really start like evaluating the
year behind and looking at what I want
to do in the year ahead. That is one of
the things that we do. It's one of the
things that I do personally.
I would love feedback of any sort,
suggestions, recommendations, all that
kind of stuff because this is going to
help us really do more for you in the
year ahead. Uh, we appreciate you much.
We want to do the most that we can for
you. Thank you. I'm going to let you
have the rest of your time off. Go have
yourself a good one and we will see you
next season.
[Music]