Detailed Notes
Welcome to Season 25 of the Building Better Developers podcast! 🎉 This time, we’re handing the mic (kind of) to artificial intelligence.
In this season premiere, Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche explore how AI can support, challenge, and even inspire better software development practices. We’re calling it: Building Better Developers with AI.
🚀 Episode Highlights: • Why we let ChatGPT help pick our season theme • The difference between AI, ML, and deep learning (in plain English) • Real-world dev tools powered by AI • Prompt engineering tips (and frustrations) • How to avoid blindly trusting AI-generated code
Whether you’re AI-curious or already integrating tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot into your workflow, this episode sets the tone for a season full of practical insights and a little bit of fun.
🧠 “No math hats. No buzzword fatigue. Just real talk about AI for developers.”
👉 Subscribe and follow along as we explore how developers can use AI to build smarter, not harder.
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🔗 Subscribe & Listen on All Platforms: https://develpreneur.com/ Episode recap: https://develpreneur.com/building-better-developers-with-ai-season-25/
💬 Join the conversation: What’s your take on AI in development? Drop a comment below and let us know how you’re using AI in your workflow!
⏱️ Timestamps 00:00 Pre-show 02:00 Podcast Intro 06:30 Season wrap-up review 27:00 Podcast wrap-up 30:30 Bonus material
#AIForDevelopers #BuildingBetterDevelopers #ChatGPT #PromptEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment #DevPodcast
Transcript Text
[Music] Let me go over here. Here's what I'm thinking. We were going to we discussed the idea of doing like every episode AI gen you know talk to AI do a little chat GPT work and see what it has to say. I think I want to start with because I think what would be a good thing to do? I had a couple. The one that came to mind would be let's ask chat GPT what would be a good season of developor and spend a little time going down that rabbit hole and my my concern is that we're going to get such a good time like that's going to be our season which is okay or we're going to have this where we're just going to step in we'll have a question of the day basically and spend a little chat GBT time talking about its responses and things like that and maybe even a little bit of a game almost of like well where do we think it's going to take us and stuff like that because I think there's some really cool areas we can go and say okay you like common knowledge and things like that the um like what's the you know what's a great language to learn for programming you know things like that some of these things that people probably have their their reasons for it but we'll do it and we'll see what it what it tells us so how about that for the first one yeah on chat you can see go ahead and and yeah and see where that goes. And I guess at the end of that though, we got to figure out what our season is so I know how to It does. By the end of this, we're going to be like, this is going to be our season. It may just be more AI, but it may be whatever that title is. So, this is definitely going to be people seeing how the sausage is made with a three, a two, a one. Well, hello and welcome back. We are building better developers. We are in a new season. We just finished up our prior one and we are starting a new one. We don't even know what the season topic is going to be yet. More on that later. First introductions. I am Rob Broadhead, one of the founders of de developer, also a founder of RB Consulting, where we are, as some people call it, a boutique consulting firm where, in our case, we sit down, we're very specific about working with our customer to figure out where they're at, what is their business, what is the goals, what are some of the things that are their secret sauce, and then craft a specific recipe for them of using technology and a roadmap to be better in the future, a better business based on leveraging technology. And that includes things like simplification, integration, automation, innovation. Whether you're you've got a custom app that needs to be rebuilt, whether you've got something needs to be upgraded, whether you've got too many cooks in the kitchen, you need to integrate some of those systems, give yourself a single dashboard, those kinds of things. We're going to help you find the best solutions out there because we play in that world all the time. You don't. So, we're going to allow you to keep doing your business, do more to work on your business, and we're going to help you the in your business part go a little smoother and a little faster. Good things, bad things. Um, so Memorial Day was just this last week. Um, it was a rainy, rainy day. It was a crappy day and we were in a little town in Tennessee where basically everything shuts down for Memorial Day and then also was just shut down in general because it was, you know, not very good weather. And by it wasn't like pouring rain, but it was like just a little bit of drizzle. So, it's the stuff where you can be out in it. It's just not comfortable to do it for a long period of time. That was the bad thing. Well, actually, part of that was the places we wanted to go for breakfast were all closed. We ended up having it at a a fast food restaurant because we just like we wanted some food. We were hungry. got in, got our food. This is where the good thing is. We got out a lot faster than we would have. And so we were just walking through this downtown area and stumbled across a Memorial Day celebration. We got there like just as it started, like they were just starting the first part of it and got to be a part of, you know, by part of got to witness the entire ceremony and all that kind of stuff. So it was really good to be able to actually embrace Memorial Day in this little town and and all of their thanks to the vets and things like that. So sometimes the bad things do lead us to good things. For example, my bad introduction is going to lead you to hopefully a good introduction for Michael. Go ahead. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Malashsh. I'm one of the co-founders of building better developers, also known as developer. I'm also the founder of a company called Envision QA where we work with businesses small and large to help you streamline your business. You could be struggling with outdated software. you could be struggling to find the right software to help you run your business. We step in, we work with you, we help you, we walk through the process with you, we understand your processes and procedures, and then we kind of put together that assessment and help you figure out where your pain points are and how to improve your business. And then through the process, we will help you establish what you need to be a more productive and streamlined uh business so you can make your customers happy and actually hopefully bring in more money. Good thing, bad thing? Well, similar to Rob, you know, Memorial Day was just the past weekend. Unlike Rob, I had tsunami like weather most of the weekend. There were days looking out my window, you literally couldn't see 5t past the deck. There was so much rain. It was like Niagara Falls. But the first day, uh, the Friday evening after the rainstorms, it was sunny for about 6 hours and then 3:00 in the night, we had hail, wind, storms. It it just and then it's like, okay, here we're going to be clear for about 4 hours and then boom, here's another tsunami. Uh the good side of that was uh my pond is back all the way up again. It was kind of going down. Um and my garden is looking nice and healthy. It may be overwatered at this point and I need a few days of sun, but the good thing is I don't have to worry about watering my garden or my yard for quite a while. So this season we talked about a couple of things and one of the things that we had come across was the idea of maybe integrating AI into each episode so that there would be like maybe a question or something like that that we would go with. And in thinking through it, I think what we want to do this time is we're going to actually use AI potentially to figure out what our episode or season's topic is going to be. So I'm going to walk through this just chat GPT. I'm going to walk through asking it some questions and we'll see what it says and we'll sort of go down some of these rabbit holes. So the first question is I said what are good season topics for the developer-building better developers podcast and the funny thing is is it gives me uh looks like eight seasons of topics with about looks like about five to six bullet points for each one. So for example and some of these I think we've done some of this season one from developer to software craftsman focus is foundational principles and mindset evolution. They talk about clean code and pra practice solid principles of real life tech debt managing it and avoiding it writing codes for humans and future you uh test driven development pros cons when they work. A lot of these sound very familiar. Season two, building better software projects. Designing software with the focus is project planning and architecture. Uh designing software with scalability, choosing the right tech stack, estimating software projects that don't suck. Requirements gathering for developers, agile, scrum, conbon, what works and why. Season three, security for everyday developers. They talk about OASP and a versus a z writing secure APIs. Uh secrets management, secure by design. Season four, developer tool belt, mastering the tools. Uh things like get internals every dev should know, setting up CI/CD, Docker and Containers 101, monitoring and logging, using ids like IDE like a power user. Uh season 5 full stack fundamentals, front-end frameworks comparisons, R versus GraphQL, backend with Spring Boot, Node or Django, databases, DevOps basics for developers. Uh, season six, career development for developers. Building a portfolio, certifications, are they worth it? How to prep for interviews, avoiding burnout, becoming a tech lead without burning out? Season seven, AI and automation for developers. How is AI changing coding, prompt engineering, automating repetitive tra tasks with scripts, ML basics, ethics of AI, season 8, the last one it gave us, communication and teamwork, writing better documentation, giving and receiving code reviews, navigating tech debt, working with non-technical stakeholders, mentorship and pair programming. And then it says afterwards it says, "Well, let me know your show's tone or audience level, junior devs, team leads, indie hackers, etc., and I can help customize these topics further or outline a full episode structure per season." So, let's pause there. What are your thoughts on this? So, it it's kind of funny because we have actually covered most of that at least in like the first two seasons. It mentioned the last one definitely. Uh, some of the other stuff goes back to some of the kind of hands-on videos we did with our coding and that back in the day, some of the security stuff we did. Um, it kind of prompted me to want to uh there's some topics there that would be better served, I think, as uh going back to our kind of how-to videos with kind of walking through software. But the AI one was interesting because the biggest one I hear a lot and I struggle with this one too is prompting AI to kind of give you what you need. You know that that's one of the biggest struggles with AI because you it's like Dragon Naturally Speaking. You have to train it to understand your way of thinking and then once you've spent enough time with it, you can pretty much just start with one question and then say okay and give me more or hey that's not quite right do this like you are training AI but AI is also training you into how to kind of your if then responses to the conversation that you're having. Exactly. And that's that's part of the problem I've I've seen in a couple of cases, for example, that I've had more than a few that have gotten mindbendingly circular because there's two, you know, essentially there's like two versions of solutions and it'll keep bouncing back and forth between of them and it'll get all the way through one and it'll be like, well, hey, have you tried this? And it goes all the way through and then you go back to the other and then you're like, wait a minute, which one am I doing? And it'll sometimes mix and match some of those uh some of the key periods. It's like make sure you do X, but it'll have it in the wrong stack of of steps essentially. So there's there's definitely some stuff there where you have to train it. You have to do some trial and error and let it know things like, hey, this is what I tried and this is what I'm getting. So, you know, those kinds of and it'll always be like, thank you. I needed that extra context. Here's some other crap. And it really is good for getting you through those u the the walls that we put up or you know writer's block and and things like that. So maybe that's where that sort of points to maybe we'll we'll stick with this. So what do you think? Should we what should we give it for let's see give a little bit more. So like what do we want to say the audience level is or maybe the tone? Uh let's go. So I think AI is still fairly new. Uh so I would say uh the audience is going to be AI novice but probably mid-level developer go with that. Although this is you know focusing a little on AI but let's go with this. So I'm going to say the tone is fun and educational. Let's say casual. Now it's interesting too. Um, are you using the paid version or the free version? Because there are differences between the two and we need to throw that out. The paid version I've got like the the low end of that. So, it's using whatever the chat GPT4 four five whatever the latest version is which you get that I think even free you just get like very limited amounts of it. And then it has to do with its uh how fast it will respond as well. So, I'm going to say this tone is casual, fun, and educational. audience is an AI novice but midlevel developer. Let's see what it says here. Perfect. With a casual, fun, and educational tone and an audience of mid-level developers who are AI noviceses, you can strike a balance between technical depth and beginner friendly explanation. Here's a refined set of season themes tailored. So, uh, AI for the rest of us, season one theme, demystify a IML for everyday devs tone. You don't need a PhD to understand this stuff. Episodes. What the heck is AI really? ML versus AI versus data science. Buzzword bingo. How chat chatpt PT chat GPT like my speaking kind of works which is a really good little topic. Cool projects to try with AI APIs. AI tools that actually make you faster and some that don't. Prompt engineering like for developers. Bias hallucinations and other weird owl quirks. Not or weird AI quirks. We're now a little bit different, I guess. Uh, season two, the developer tools shed. They get back into that. Um, they really just check get tips you'll wish you knew last year. CI/CD without tears. Docker's containers and WTF is a volume IDA short IDE shortcuts debugging like Sherlock Holmes. So really it looks like what it's doing here is it's mostly giving us uh some moderified topic or titles but roughly the same kind of subject. So let's see. Would you like help unw outlining one full season's episode, scripting an intro or picking guest tools to highlight? So, how do we want to let's uh let's see kind what were the first two uh AI for the rest of us and the developer tool shed. You want to do season one? Let's see what that does. Yeah, I kind of like the first one that that one on season because it kind of goes really well with from last season. So, because we do talk a lot about developer tools and that, but we also talk a lot about businesses. So with AI especially, we can keep it kind of for everyone uh be a developer or a business. So absolutely. Let's break down season one AI for the rest of us and craft a compelling, casual, and educational intro for the season and each episode. This season's goal is to make AI feel approachable, practical, and fun for mid-level devs who are just starting to explore it. Season one, AI for the rest of us. tagline, no math hats, no buzzword fatigue, just real talk on how developers like you can start using AI today. Season intro first episode or trailer. Welcome to the developer building better developers. I'm okay. I'm Rob. I'm going to do this like verbatim. So, it's going to be AIish. I'm Rob. In this season, we're diving into something that's got everyone buzzing, panicking, or pretending they already know what it means, AI. But don't worry, this isn't some dry academic lecture or enterprise sales pitch. for calling this season AI for the rest of us. If you're a developer who knows your way around a codebase, but has no idea what the difference is between a neural network and a pizza delivery route, this is your season. We'll break down the basics, explore tools you can use right now, and talk about how AI can help you, not replace you. So, fire up your terminal, grab your coffee, let's get smarter together. I'll talk about the episode one episode one breakdown real quick and then let's I want to talk a little bit more about what it just gave us. So, episode one, what the heck is AI really? Goal: Define AI in plain English with relatable analogies. Talking points, AI versus ML versus deep learning. How your app can learn without hard coding logic. Real world examples, autocomplete, Netflix, prod fraud detection, what AI is not. Skynet soul having robots. So that's a pretty good episode to talk about it. Now, I want to go back to this is something I've found really fun with AI and a couple other things I've done. Yes, it's really good um pretty good for coding. You could there's a lot of stuff particularly very repetitive tasks that you can get coded real easy. So, the ones that I find that are I'm always going to have typos or something stupid like that that'll drag my, you know, productivity down are JavaScript functions and stuff like that. if you want to say, "Hey, I need to uh pop a shadow box when this value is above 100," and you give it that script, and then it'll give you here's how you modify your script, and it's pretty darn good. Now, sometimes it'll, you know, it'll mix a variable or something like that, which is down to the same kinds of stupid debugging that, you know, stuff that we will do if we have a typo, but particularly if it's something that's going to take you more than three lines of code, it is it could be very helpful. um or numerous times that I've had stuff where I know it's going to take like there's five steps each of those steps are going to take five to 10 lines of code and I can either write all that code and do it myself or I can take AI it's going to give me that template for lack of lack of better term I can then take that put it into my code tweak it as I need to and then I'm going to end up saving myself sometimes you know an hour or two of coding and and just the general walking through it's like how do I solve this problem again it's sort of like having your own code toolbox that we've talked about your own personal repository, but now it's something I don't even have to go out there. I can go to AI just as easily. I want to talk though a little bit about this is what do you think about like that that intro because I'm finding that it is very sometimes it writes some really compelling stuff with just a little bit of a tweak. Yeah, I I think that was actually a very good kind of summary to come back with for what we essentially could do for this whole season. Uh, one thing I will throw out though because you kind of mentioned using it to get little code snippets. I will throw this is one of those warnings of using AI and it's very similar to just surfing the web too to get an answer. Be careful what you ask. So like if you're actually looking for command line uh examples, don't just blindly copy and paste and run. you could crash your entire system. If you are doing things that require more security, more command line, AI is great, but still take their response and go Google it. Look at like maybe Stack Overflow. Look to add some reputable sites to get a little more research to confirm that, hey, this is the right approach and not something that's going to take me down or crash my entire network or software. Uh, I have had that happen. I but I've also had that happen from going to a site and following directions on something um from an actual manufacturer site and they had a typo and that typo caused things to go ary. So there are pros and cons to everything that we do and AI is no different. I think with that it's not just go to you know and this is where I think some people get into this loop of they're like oh they don't really know it so they'll go AI and then they'll go to Google they'll go backwards and forwards and you know compare a couple of those you should make sure that whatever the problem is you're solving that you understand the problem that you're solving what the solution should do just you know you should know that like I said the example I use these are the things that you should be able to do on your own because you need to be able to vet what it is that you're given And definitely take look very closely because there have been more than a few times that there yeah there's a typo or there's something that there's an assumption in whatever the response is that can cause you issues and and things like that. So like I said use it as like a a template or a suggestion or something like that and make sure you understand what it is that you're using. One of the things I've used before is I said, "Hey, go through it and change the variable names or the function names to something that matters to that makes sense that you would use just to be sure, you know, or just get a snippet of code that's going to require input from other places and then you're going to have to change the code anyways to handle that input and that's going to force you to touch it enough as opposed to just like the copy and paste, which I have seen way too often where you see the copy and paste and it's got comments in it that are basically this is where we do this. this is where we do that which is very AI like um and it's exactly what you're going to get if you throw code at it and say just comment this code it's probably going to give you the same kind of thing. So yeah it's uh as always take it with a grain of salt. So now what I'm going to do is let's do one more question into this and we'll see because who knows where we're going to go from the season still. It says, "Would you like help writing full episode scripts, interview questions for guests, or creating social snippets or summaries for each episode?" I'm gonna say yes, all three. And so, let's see what it comes. Oh, let's get you started with scripts, interview questions, and social media snippets for season 1, episode one. What the heck is AI really? So, oh, this works out pretty good. Episode script outline style, 15 to 20 minutes. That's not bad. Uh, intro. Hey everyone, welcome to developer, building better developers. I'm Rob and today we're kicking off our season AI for the rest of us. This episode we're tackling the big question everybody asks, what the heck is AI really? And of course we could, you know, we could add to that. So this actually timing wise is going to be really good. Part one, defining AI without the buzzwords. And now it's got four bullet points. I'm not going to go too deep, but it's actually says part one, defining AI with the without buzzwords. Three minutes gives us some bullet points to go through. Uh classic analogy if traditional code is like a recipe. AI is like giving someone 100 finished dishes and asking them to reverse engineer the ingredients. That's a really good uh analogy. Um part two, four minutes, AI versus ML versus deep learning. Um and basically, oh here's some bullet points for real world AI. Roomba that avoids furniture. ML is spam filter that learns from your inbox. um DL deep learning imagine class image classifier that tells cats from dogs all of which are really good AI solutions if you haven't looked into them uh probably do because there is a value to each of those for uh some of the things for probably any project or application you're doing you can find where those are going to be useful uh so that was so at three minutes four minutes another three minutes part three real world examples you already use uh part four what AI is not is another three minutes and then there's an outro of 2 minutes. Next week, we'll decode the jargon. NLP, transformers, LOMs. Don't worry, it won't hurt. Until then, try spotting how many AI powered things you interact with this week. Hint, it's probably more than you think. So, that's actually for a, you know, a summary. That's a really good, I think, approach to how we often do our our episodes. Here's some interview questions. Uh, optional segment or full episode. Uh, some guest interview questions would be, how would you explain AI to your non- tech family members? Uh, what was your first real world AI aha moment as a dev? What are some misconceptions developers have about AI? What's something AI is good at and something it's terrible at? Do you think every developer needs to learn machine learning or why or why not ML? Uh, social media snippets for Twitter X, LinkedIn threads. New episode drop. What the heck is AI really? Kicks off season one of developer. Perfect for devs who know code but not transformers. What's the difference between AI, ML, and deep learning? Hint, not just marketing. Season 1, episode one. Breaks it down in plain dev speak. Listen now with a link. And three, if your code is like a recipe, AI is a chef who figures it out just by tasting the dish. This and more metaphors in episode one of our new season, AI for the rest of us. So, thoughts on how AI has like laid out an episode for us. Yeah, I I've played around with AI a lot doing things like that and it's interesting how concise it kind of got down there probably because there's been a lot of conversations. I mean a lot of what we get out of the AIS like Czech GPT cop it's what's been fed into what it's been allowed to kind of scrape from the internet. So I think chat GPT is one of the fewer models that is a little more behind because I think it's I don't think that one's connected to the internet. So I don't think it can just go out at real time and just go scrape a site. Uh but Copilot and some of the other ones can. So I really like some of the ideas and topics it came up with. I I really like kind of that first uh first few top uh ideas because that's kind of what we've just done here, right? We just kind of walked through a brief overview what AI is. Uh some of those get a little deep though for kind of I think the direction of like the season should go like we I don't think we need to get too deep in the weeds with some of like the higher like the deep learning and machine learning. Uh outside of talking about them and giving some good examples. Uh, but I think for the first season, we should kind of keep it more at that interactive the the higher level AI. So, here's a thought I had as I was going through this one. I just checked I was in chat GPT and I was like, "Okay, what's the name of the latest post?" Because I figured that's, you know, newish and it actually went out to the web and then it gives me it basically, I guess, does its own effectively Google search or something like that, which is so it's pretty cool. It gives me some, you know, some good answers and stuff like that. Um, it doesn't give me it does give me like a a Wikipedia thing, a little bit of a and it comes from AP New. Oh, and it actually is giving me some good uh a nice little bibliography here. It's like, you know, here it is. Wikipedia plus 14, Reuters plus 7. Uh, a little bit more information. AP News plus two, Wikipedia plus one. Uh, here's something from Vox. So, it tells me where the sources are, which is really nice. Um, so you can always go back to those and it gives you some links to each of these. So, it does have some usefulness there. That being said, I don't want to digress too much. So, here's what I was thinking about that just sort of came to me for this season. How about we take a past season, uh maybe we go two seasons back where we had the the challenges, the building better developer, you know, focused on building better developers, and we take each episode and we talk about the topic, but now we're going to go to AI and see what AI thinks about it. That's an interesting. we just basically repeat the season, same topics, but we're going to we're going to basically bring in we're going to interview AI for each one of those episodes and say, "Well, what do you think?" And I think it'd be really interesting to see with some of them is maybe we do it first with just like what does AI think about that topic? And then we take because we could we probably can take the um transcript I don't know if it's it may be too big or take part of the transcript of what we did maybe our blog summary and shove that into AI and say you know okay based on this what are your thoughts or something like that. So I think like I think a rehash of that prior season would be a really fun one to see and it also is going to I think it's going to spark some other ideas and things like maybe new challenges. So, thoughts on that? Yeah, it's a lot that's a lot of fun. And by the way, I believe the transcripts will fit um because our episodes are small enough that uh we could we shouldn't have a problem doing that. So, we have a season topic. This is awesome. We're going to take a prior season topic and we're going to pump it through AI and see what happens. I'm I'm already excited to see how this one goes. I have a feeling it's going to get really interesting really fast. We'll try to we're going to have to keep it short how much we integrate AI because I have a feeling we're going to have a commentary on every one of its answers essentially. All right. So, we have achieved our goal of a season topic. So, this season we're going to take the prior season building better developers with AI. So, like you could think of it with like a little uh super script like with AI now with AI or something like that. We're just going to we're like everybody else. We are jumping on the band bandwagon. We're going to do the same thing we did. Now, we're going to add AI and see what happens. And I have a feeling this is going to be really fun and and uh educational as well as far as what a what AI will give us and what maybe it may maybe where it could may lead us astray, things like that. Hopefully, we won't be starting up Skynet anytime soon based on these questions. That being said, we're going to wrap this one up. As always, love to hear your feedback, your thoughts. [email protected]. Shoot us an email. Leave us comments wherever you're watching this or listening to this, whether it's out on any wherever you listen to podcasts. If you're going somewhere where you don't hear us, we're not there, where you grab podcast and we're not there, let us know. This should be we should be everywhere, but hey, stuff pops up. We may not be there yet. Love to add it there. Uh YouTube, the developer channel, we have got oh gosh, we've got to have close to a hundred episodes of the podcast in video form. And then before that, we've got I'm I'm pretty sure over 100, maybe 200 different episodes of howto's of mentor presentations. There's a lot of content back there. Was working with somebody just the other day and was just talking about like my the RV consulting site and happened to mention, oh, by the way, there's the developer site and they like their jaw hit the ground with like that's a lot of content that like that's a game-changing amount of content based on what you were just saying that well, you know, I've got a few blogs here and a few things. It's like no, there's a lot of stuff there. So, I'm just saying that so that you can go out there and and take advantage of it. You know, definitely. And if you have questions about any of that stuff, no matter how old it is, we're happy to, you know, feel that, update the comment, the content if we need to or whatever it is to help you become a better developer today. Go out there and just be a better human as well as a better developer. Go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. I'm going to start with what would be a good bonus content for episode one. Let's see what that is. So, that's our bonus content this time around. A great bonus content idea would be something fun, practical, and immediately useful helping listeners reinforce what they've learned or explore beyond the episode. Here's a few great options tailored for your casual, fun, and educational tone. So I'm just going to go there's like bullet points with each of these which actually I'll give you the first one then we'll go into others. I don't want to get too far. One play with AI mini lab PDF plus GitHub link. Provide a downloadable mini project a simple Python notebook or sprint or script using transformers scikitlearn or open AI libraries. Example build a basic chatbot with GPT or create an AI generated poem from your name. It's funny I've used both of those in some of the stuff I was just going through. Add comments and links to resources for each section. GitHub link with a few branches beginner version plus stretch goals title playground AI a 15 minute chatbot chatbot project uh other one extended interview clip or AMA an extra 5 to 10 minute clip uh basically some discussion stuff like that we normally do uh AI glossery quick uh quick guide a onepage downloadable PDF with a lot of terms and definitions uh interactive AI tool list for devs a curated notion Google doc markdown list kind of thing. Um, so that's actually some pretty cool little bonus things. So, we may have to we may even like ping AI for our bonus stuff going out of that. Your thoughts, bonus material from you? Yeah. So, one of the things uh I like the playground idea, but uh the bonus of this, if you are writing software and you you're just not sure where to begin with using AI, start with take a section of code, throw it into AI, and say, "Write me a test for this." So, if you're in Java, say, "Write me a unit JUnit test." If you're in Python, a pi test, whatever. But start with testing. see what it does for testing because you're less likely to break something through a test than actually modifying your existing code. So if you're going to kind of get into AI, I think coming at it with a test-driven approach is kind of me a more fun way because one, you're testing your code, but two, you find ways of how to test your code that maybe you never thought to test or oh, I didn't know the user could do that. And and you find you uncover things that you didn't think of. I think that's actually a perfect example. I got I I know I gave my bonus stuff, but I want to add to that. That is something that I found that is that kind of repetitive coding stuff that if you're thinking about it, you sort of know how you want to, you know, you there's that sort of list we've talked about with testing where you want to test like, you know, the happy path and when there's missing variables and there's stuff out of range and stuff like that. AI is not going to necessarily get all of those, but you can add those by starting with here's my code. write some tests for it and it's going to give you a good start. It's going to give you a good framework and then you can always say also add tests for A, B, C and D and it will give you those additional ones and it's really a good way to get through testing that can take it can take a while to write the test. Now I will warn you sometimes the tests that it generates are going to cause you problems but a lot of times the reason going to cause you problem is because your code isn't right. that there's something your code's not catching or the code's not thinking about and then it's going to catch it and now suddenly it's like well that test doesn't succeed correct because it's not supposed to because you didn't write the code right. So there's a lot of things like that that are uh like the testing thing that I think are great for AI where it's like you know there's a bulk of code. It's a it's a classic create a class that has these properties and has these methods and stuff like that. You can get AI to generate that from a sentence or two very quickly and then go back and then tweak the code as you need to. And then there's there's so many other little things like that where it's it seems little. It may save you five or 10 minutes, but if you can, you know, go from 10 minutes to one minute on a couple of tasks a day, the next thing you know, you've saved a half hour, an hour. So, there really is a lot of value in that. And I think that's a that's a perfect place to start is, especially if you haven't written unit tests, if you don't know how to test in whatever your language is, it will give you a great start on that and then you can go from there to build out something that is is much more valuable. We are going to wrap this one up. I'm I'm already pumped. I'm so excited to get into see, you know, two and three and we've got to go back and and grab those episode topics and make sure that we're ready with them next time around. It's also going to really mess up though our pre-show because we're actually going to know what we're going to talk about each week. This I haven't done this in gosh, I don't know how long since the interviews. The interviews and even then I didn't know what we're going to talk about. I just knew who we were going to talk to. So, it's been a long time since we've come into an episode essentially knowing what the episode's going to be about beforehand. This may test like our marketing skills because now we can say next week we're going to talk about this and we actually know what we're going to talk about as opposed to join us next week and see what crazy topic we come up with. Thank you again for your time, your patience for putting up with us. I hope that you are entertained as as we are with this and moving forward because I think this is going to be a really good one. So, if you especially if you haven't really messed around with AI or you're not really sure what it can do, I think it's going to be this season for you. I think it's going to be really uh a great introduction into it. It's not necessarily going to get super deep, although we might I may go share out like I've got a a chatbot that I grabbed from somewhere that was mostly built through some AI stuff and things like that. It's like, well, hey, how about adding this, how about adding that? Uh, and it uses just that's why I have the paid version of uh the open AAI of chat GPT is so that I can use that API and make some calls and there's some really cool stuff that comes out of it. So, uh, we'll see how far we get into it. I've spent too much time. This is almost off the rails if not completely. So, go out there and have yourself a good one and we will talk to you next time. [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
Let me go over here. Here's what I'm
thinking. We were going to we discussed
the idea of doing like every episode AI
gen you know talk to AI do a little chat
GPT work and see what it has to say. I
think I want to start with because I
think what would be a good thing to do?
I had a couple. The one that came to
mind would be let's ask chat GPT what
would be a good season of developor and
spend a little time going down that
rabbit hole and my my concern is that
we're going to get such a good time like
that's going to be our season which is
okay or we're going to have this where
we're just going to step in we'll have a
question of the day basically and spend
a little chat GBT time talking about its
responses and things like that and maybe
even a little bit of a game almost of
like well where do we think it's going
to take us and stuff like that because I
think there's some really cool areas we
can go and say
okay you like common knowledge and
things like
that the um like what's the you know
what's a great language to learn for
programming you know things like that
some of these things that people
probably have their their reasons for it
but we'll do it and we'll see what it
what it tells
us so how about that for the first one
yeah on chat you can see go ahead and
and yeah and see where that goes. And I
guess at the end of that though, we got
to figure out what our season is so I
know how to It does. By the end of this,
we're going to be like, this is going to
be our season. It may just be more AI,
but it may be whatever that title is.
So, this is definitely going to be
people seeing how the sausage is made
with a three, a two, a one. Well, hello
and welcome back. We are building better
developers. We are in a new season. We
just finished up our prior one and we
are starting a new one. We don't even
know what the season topic is going to
be yet. More on that later. First
introductions. I am Rob Broadhead, one
of the founders of de
developer, also a founder of RB
Consulting, where we are, as some people
call it, a boutique consulting firm
where, in our case, we sit down, we're
very specific about working with our
customer to figure out where they're at,
what is their business, what is the
goals, what are some of the things that
are their secret sauce, and then craft a
specific recipe for them of using
technology and a roadmap to be better in
the future, a better business based on
leveraging technology. And that includes
things like simplification, integration,
automation, innovation. Whether you're
you've got a custom app that needs to be
rebuilt, whether you've got something
needs to be upgraded, whether you've got
too many cooks in the kitchen, you need
to integrate some of those systems, give
yourself a single dashboard, those kinds
of things. We're going to help you find
the best solutions out there because we
play in that world all the time. You
don't. So, we're going to allow you to
keep doing your business, do more to
work on your business, and we're going
to help you the in your business part go
a little smoother and a little faster.
Good things, bad things. Um, so Memorial
Day was just this last week. Um, it was
a rainy, rainy day. It was a crappy day
and we were in a little town in
Tennessee where basically everything
shuts down for Memorial Day and then
also was just shut down in general
because it was, you know, not very good
weather. And by it wasn't like pouring
rain, but it was like just a little bit
of drizzle. So, it's the stuff where you
can be out in it. It's just not
comfortable to do it for a long period
of time. That was the bad thing. Well,
actually, part of that was the places we
wanted to go for breakfast were all
closed. We ended up having it at a a
fast food restaurant because we just
like we wanted some food. We were
hungry.
got in, got our food. This is where the
good thing is. We got out a lot faster
than we would have. And so we were just
walking through this downtown area and
stumbled across a Memorial Day
celebration. We got there like just as
it started, like they were just starting
the first part of it and got to be a
part of, you know, by part of got to
witness the entire ceremony and all that
kind of stuff. So it was really good to
be able to actually embrace Memorial Day
in this little town and and all of their
thanks to the vets and things like that.
So sometimes the bad things do lead us
to good things. For example, my bad
introduction is going to lead you to
hopefully a good introduction for
Michael. Go ahead. Hey everyone, my name
is Michael Malashsh. I'm one of the
co-founders of building better
developers, also known as developer. I'm
also the founder of a company called
Envision QA where we work with
businesses small and large to help you
streamline your business. You could be
struggling with outdated software. you
could be struggling to find the right
software to help you run your business.
We step in, we work with you, we help
you, we walk through the process with
you, we understand your processes and
procedures, and then we kind of put
together that assessment and help you
figure out where your pain points are
and how to improve your business. And
then through the process, we will help
you establish what you need to be a more
productive and streamlined uh business
so you can make your customers happy and
actually hopefully bring in more money.
Good thing, bad thing? Well, similar to
Rob, you know, Memorial Day was just the
past weekend. Unlike Rob, I had tsunami
like weather most of the weekend. There
were days looking out my window, you
literally couldn't see 5t past the deck.
There was so much rain. It was like
Niagara Falls. But the first day, uh,
the Friday evening after the rainstorms,
it was sunny for about 6 hours and then
3:00 in the night, we had hail, wind,
storms. It it just and then it's like,
okay, here we're going to be clear for
about 4 hours and then boom, here's
another tsunami. Uh the good side of
that was uh my pond is back all the way
up again. It was kind of going down. Um
and my garden is looking nice and
healthy. It may be overwatered at this
point and I need a few days of sun, but
the good thing is I don't have to worry
about watering my garden or my yard for
quite a while.
So this season we talked about a couple
of things and one of the things that we
had come across was the idea of maybe
integrating AI into each episode so that
there would be like maybe a question or
something like that that we would go
with. And in thinking through it, I
think what we want to do this time is
we're going to actually use AI
potentially to figure out what our
episode or season's topic is going to
be. So I'm going to walk through this
just chat GPT. I'm going to walk through
asking it some questions and we'll see
what it says and we'll sort of go down
some of these rabbit holes. So the first
question is I said what are good season
topics for the developer-building better
developers podcast and the funny thing
is is it gives me uh looks like eight
seasons
of topics with about looks like about
five to six bullet points for each one.
So for example and some of these I think
we've done some of this season one from
developer to software craftsman focus is
foundational principles and mindset
evolution. They talk about clean code
and pra practice solid principles of
real life tech debt managing it and
avoiding it writing codes for humans and
future you uh test driven development
pros cons when they work. A lot of these
sound very familiar. Season two,
building better software projects.
Designing software with the focus is
project planning and architecture. Uh
designing software with scalability,
choosing the right tech stack,
estimating software projects that don't
suck. Requirements gathering for
developers, agile, scrum, conbon, what
works and why. Season three, security
for everyday developers. They talk about
OASP and a versus a z writing secure
APIs. Uh secrets management, secure by
design. Season four, developer tool
belt, mastering the tools. Uh things
like get internals every dev should
know, setting up CI/CD, Docker and
Containers 101, monitoring and logging,
using ids like IDE like a power user. Uh
season 5 full stack fundamentals,
front-end frameworks comparisons, R
versus GraphQL, backend with Spring
Boot, Node or Django, databases, DevOps
basics for developers. Uh, season six,
career development for developers.
Building a portfolio, certifications,
are they worth it? How to prep for
interviews, avoiding burnout, becoming a
tech lead without burning out? Season
seven, AI and automation for developers.
How is AI changing coding, prompt
engineering, automating repetitive tra
tasks with scripts, ML basics, ethics of
AI, season 8, the last one it gave us,
communication and teamwork, writing
better documentation, giving and
receiving code reviews, navigating tech
debt, working with non-technical
stakeholders, mentorship and pair
programming. And then it says afterwards
it says, "Well, let me know your show's
tone or audience level, junior devs,
team leads, indie hackers, etc., and I
can help customize these topics further
or outline a full episode structure per
season." So, let's pause there. What are
your thoughts on this? So, it it's kind
of funny because we have actually
covered most of that at least in like
the first two seasons. It mentioned the
last one definitely. Uh, some of the
other stuff goes back to some of the
kind of hands-on videos we did with our
coding and that back in the day, some of
the security stuff we did.
Um, it kind of prompted me to want to uh
there's some topics there that would be
better served, I think, as uh going back
to our kind of how-to videos with kind
of walking through software. But the AI
one was interesting because the biggest
one I hear a lot and I struggle with
this one too is prompting AI to kind of
give you what you need. You know that
that's one of the biggest struggles with
AI because you it's like Dragon
Naturally Speaking. You have to train it
to understand your way of thinking and
then once you've spent enough time with
it, you can pretty much just start with
one question and then say okay and give
me more or hey that's not quite right do
this like you are training AI but AI is
also training you into how to kind of
your if then responses to the
conversation that you're having.
Exactly. And that's that's part of the
problem I've I've seen in a couple of
cases, for example, that I've had more
than a few that have gotten
mindbendingly circular because there's
two, you know, essentially there's like
two versions of solutions and it'll keep
bouncing back and forth between of them
and it'll get all the way through one
and it'll be like, well, hey, have you
tried this? And it goes all the way
through and then you go back to the
other and then you're like, wait a
minute, which one am I doing? And it'll
sometimes mix and match some of those uh
some of the key periods. It's like make
sure you do X, but it'll have it in the
wrong stack of of steps essentially. So
there's there's definitely some stuff
there where you have to train it. You
have to do some trial and error and let
it know things like, hey, this is what I
tried and this is what I'm getting. So,
you know, those kinds of and it'll
always be like, thank you. I needed that
extra context. Here's some other crap.
And it really is good for getting you
through those u the the walls that we
put up or you know writer's block and
and things like that. So maybe that's
where that sort of points to maybe we'll
we'll stick with this. So what do you
think? Should we what should we give it
for let's see give a little bit more. So
like what do we want to say the audience
level is or maybe the tone?
Uh let's go. So I think AI is still
fairly new. Uh so I would say uh the
audience is going to be AI novice but
probably mid-level developer
go with that. Although this is you know
focusing a little on AI but let's go
with this. So I'm going to say the tone
is fun and educational. Let's say
casual. Now it's interesting too. Um,
are you using the paid version or the
free version? Because there are
differences between the two and we need
to throw that out. The paid version I've
got like the the low end of that. So,
it's using whatever the chat GPT4 four
five whatever the latest version is
which you get that I think even free you
just get like very limited amounts of
it. And then it has to do with its uh
how fast it will respond as well. So,
I'm going to say this tone is casual,
fun, and educational. audience is an AI
novice but midlevel
developer. Let's see what it says
here. Perfect. With a casual, fun, and
educational tone and an audience of
mid-level developers who are AI
noviceses, you can strike a balance
between technical depth and beginner
friendly explanation. Here's a refined
set of season themes tailored. So, uh,
AI for the rest of us, season one theme,
demystify a IML for everyday devs tone.
You don't need a PhD to understand this
stuff. Episodes. What the heck is AI
really? ML versus AI versus data
science. Buzzword bingo. How chat chatpt
PT chat GPT like my speaking kind of
works which is a really good little
topic. Cool projects to try with AI
APIs. AI tools that actually make you
faster and some that don't. Prompt
engineering like for developers. Bias
hallucinations and other weird owl
quirks. Not or weird AI quirks. We're
now a little bit different, I
guess. Uh, season two, the developer
tools shed. They get back into that. Um,
they really just check get tips you'll
wish you knew last year. CI/CD without
tears. Docker's containers and WTF is a
volume IDA short IDE shortcuts debugging
like Sherlock Holmes. So really it looks
like what it's doing here is it's mostly
giving us
uh some
moderified topic or titles but roughly
the same kind of subject. So let's see.
Would you like help unw outlining one
full season's episode, scripting an
intro or picking guest tools to
highlight?
So, how do we want to let's uh let's see
kind what were the first two uh AI for
the rest of us and the developer tool
shed. You want to do season one? Let's
see what that does. Yeah, I kind of like
the first one that that one on season
because it kind of goes really well with
from last season. So, because we do talk
a lot about developer tools and that,
but we also talk a lot about businesses.
So with AI especially, we can keep it
kind of for everyone uh be a developer
or a business.
So absolutely. Let's break down season
one AI for the rest of us and craft a
compelling, casual, and educational
intro for the season and each episode.
This season's goal is to make AI feel
approachable, practical, and fun for
mid-level devs who are just starting to
explore it. Season one, AI for the rest
of us. tagline, no math hats, no
buzzword fatigue, just real talk on how
developers like you can start using AI
today. Season intro first episode or
trailer. Welcome to the developer
building better developers. I'm okay.
I'm Rob. I'm going to do this like
verbatim. So, it's going to be AIish.
I'm Rob. In this season, we're diving
into something that's got everyone
buzzing, panicking, or pretending they
already know what it means, AI. But
don't worry, this isn't some dry
academic lecture or enterprise sales
pitch. for calling this season AI for
the rest of us. If you're a developer
who knows your way around a codebase,
but has no idea what the difference is
between a neural network and a pizza
delivery route, this is your season.
We'll break down the basics, explore
tools you can use right now, and talk
about how AI can help you, not replace
you. So, fire up your terminal, grab
your coffee, let's get smarter
together. I'll talk about the episode
one episode one breakdown real quick and
then let's I want to talk a little bit
more about what it just gave us. So,
episode one, what the heck is AI really?
Goal: Define AI in plain English with
relatable analogies. Talking points, AI
versus ML versus deep learning. How your
app can learn without hard coding
logic. Real world examples,
autocomplete, Netflix, prod fraud
detection, what AI is not. Skynet soul
having
robots. So that's a pretty
good episode to talk about it. Now, I
want to go back to this is something
I've
found really fun with AI and a couple
other things I've done. Yes, it's really
good um pretty good for coding. You
could there's a lot of stuff
particularly very repetitive tasks that
you can get coded real easy. So, the
ones that I find that are I'm always
going to have typos or something stupid
like that that'll drag my, you know,
productivity down are
JavaScript functions and stuff like
that.
if you want to say, "Hey, I need to uh
pop a shadow box when this value is
above 100," and you give it that script,
and then it'll give you here's how you
modify your script, and it's pretty darn
good. Now, sometimes it'll, you know,
it'll mix a variable or something like
that, which is down to the same kinds of
stupid debugging that, you know, stuff
that we will do if we have a typo, but
particularly if it's something that's
going to take you more than three lines
of code, it is it could be very helpful.
um or numerous times that I've had stuff
where I know it's going to take like
there's five steps each of those steps
are going to take five to 10 lines of
code and I can either write all that
code and do it myself or I can take AI
it's going to give me that template for
lack of lack of better term I can then
take that put it into my code tweak it
as I need to and then I'm going to end
up saving myself sometimes you know an
hour or two of coding and and just the
general walking through it's like how do
I solve this problem again it's sort of
like having your own code toolbox that
we've talked about your own personal
repository, but now it's something I
don't even have to go out there. I can
go to AI just as easily. I want to talk
though a little bit about this is what
do you think about like that that intro
because I'm finding that it is very
sometimes it writes some really
compelling stuff with just a little bit
of a tweak. Yeah, I I think that was
actually a very good kind of summary to
come back with for what we
essentially could do for this whole
season. Uh, one thing I will throw out
though because you kind of mentioned
using it to get little code snippets. I
will throw this is one of those warnings
of using AI and it's very similar to
just surfing the web too to get an
answer. Be careful what you ask. So like
if you're actually looking for command
line uh examples, don't just blindly
copy and paste and run. you could crash
your entire
system. If you are doing things that
require more security, more command
line, AI is great, but still take their
response and go Google it. Look at like
maybe Stack Overflow. Look to add some
reputable sites to get a little more
research to confirm that, hey, this is
the right approach and not something
that's going to take me down or crash my
entire network or software. Uh, I have
had that happen. I but I've also had
that happen from going to a site and
following directions on something um
from an actual manufacturer site and
they had a typo and that typo caused
things to go ary. So there are pros and
cons to everything that we do and AI is
no different. I think with that it's not
just go to you know and this is where I
think some people get into this loop of
they're like oh they don't really know
it so they'll go AI and then they'll go
to Google they'll go backwards and
forwards and you know compare a couple
of those you should make sure that
whatever the problem is you're solving
that you understand the problem that
you're solving what the solution should
do just you know you should know that
like I said the example I use these are
the things that you should be able to do
on your own because you need to be able
to vet what it is that you're given And
definitely take look very closely
because there have been more than a few
times that there yeah there's a typo or
there's something that there's an
assumption in whatever the response is
that can cause you issues and and things
like that. So like I said use it as like
a a template or a suggestion or
something like that and make sure you
understand what it is that you're using.
One of the things I've used before is I
said, "Hey, go through it and change the
variable names or the function names to
something that matters to that makes
sense that you would use just to be
sure, you know, or just get a snippet of
code that's going to require input from
other places and then you're going to
have to change the code anyways to
handle that input and that's going to
force you to touch it enough as opposed
to just like the copy and paste, which I
have seen way too often where you see
the copy and paste and it's got comments
in it that are basically this is where
we do this. this is where we do that
which is very AI like um and it's
exactly what you're going to get if you
throw code at it and say just comment
this code it's probably going to give
you the same kind of thing. So yeah it's
uh as always take it with a grain of
salt. So now what I'm going to do is
let's do one more question into this and
we'll see because who knows where we're
going to go from the season still. It
says, "Would you like help writing full
episode scripts, interview questions for
guests, or creating social snippets or
summaries for each episode?" I'm gonna
say yes, all three. And so, let's see
what it comes. Oh, let's get you started
with scripts, interview questions, and
social media snippets for season 1,
episode one. What the heck is AI really?
So, oh, this works out pretty good.
Episode script outline style, 15 to 20
minutes. That's not bad. Uh, intro. Hey
everyone, welcome to developer, building
better developers. I'm Rob and today
we're kicking off our season AI for the
rest of us. This episode we're tackling
the big question everybody asks, what
the heck is AI really? And of course we
could, you know, we could add to that.
So this actually timing wise is going to
be really good. Part one, defining AI
without the buzzwords. And now it's got
four bullet points. I'm not going to go
too deep, but it's actually says part
one, defining AI with the without
buzzwords. Three minutes gives us some
bullet points to go through. Uh classic
analogy if traditional code is like a
recipe. AI is like giving someone 100
finished dishes and asking them to
reverse engineer the ingredients. That's
a really good
uh analogy. Um part two, four minutes,
AI versus ML versus deep learning. Um
and basically, oh here's some bullet
points for real world AI. Roomba that
avoids furniture. ML is spam filter that
learns from your inbox. um DL deep
learning imagine class image classifier
that tells cats from dogs all of which
are really good AI solutions if you
haven't looked into them uh probably do
because there is a value to each of
those for uh some of the things for
probably any project or application
you're doing you can find where those
are going to be useful uh so that was so
at three minutes four minutes another
three minutes part three real world
examples you already use uh part four
what AI is not is another three minutes
and then there's an outro of 2 minutes.
Next week, we'll decode the jargon. NLP,
transformers, LOMs. Don't worry, it
won't hurt. Until then, try spotting how
many AI powered things you interact with
this week. Hint, it's probably more than
you think. So, that's actually for a,
you know, a summary. That's a really
good, I think, approach to how we often
do our our episodes. Here's some
interview questions. Uh, optional
segment or full episode. Uh, some guest
interview questions would be, how would
you explain AI to your non- tech family
members? Uh, what was your first real
world AI aha moment as a dev? What are
some misconceptions developers have
about AI? What's something AI is good at
and something it's terrible at? Do you
think every developer needs to learn
machine learning or why or why not ML?
Uh, social media snippets for Twitter X,
LinkedIn threads. New episode drop. What
the heck is AI really? Kicks off season
one of developer. Perfect for devs who
know code but not
transformers. What's the difference
between AI, ML, and deep learning? Hint,
not just marketing. Season 1, episode
one. Breaks it down in plain dev speak.
Listen now with a link. And three, if
your code is like a recipe, AI is a chef
who figures it out just by tasting the
dish. This and more metaphors in episode
one of our new season, AI for the rest
of us. So, thoughts on how AI has like
laid out an episode for us.
Yeah, I I've played around with AI a lot
doing things like that and
it's interesting how concise it kind of
got down there probably because there's
been a lot of conversations. I mean a
lot of what we get out of the AIS like
Czech GPT cop it's what's been fed into
what it's been allowed to kind of scrape
from the internet. So I think chat GPT
is one of the fewer models that is a
little more behind because I think it's
I don't think that one's connected to
the internet. So I don't think it can
just go out at real time and just go
scrape a site. Uh but Copilot and some
of the other ones can. So I really like
some of the ideas and topics it came up
with. I I really like kind of that first
uh first few top uh ideas because that's
kind of what we've just done here,
right? We just kind of walked through a
brief overview what AI is. Uh some of
those get a little deep though for kind
of I think the direction of like the
season should go like we I don't think
we need to get
too deep in the weeds with some of like
the higher like the deep learning and
machine learning. Uh outside of talking
about them and giving some good
examples. Uh, but I think for the first
season, we should kind of keep it more
at that interactive the the higher level
AI. So, here's a thought I had as I was
going through this one. I just checked I
was in chat GPT and I was like, "Okay,
what's the name of the latest post?"
Because I figured that's, you know,
newish and it actually went out to the
web and then it gives me it basically, I
guess, does its own effectively Google
search or something like that, which is
so it's pretty cool. It gives me some,
you know, some good answers and stuff
like that. Um, it doesn't give
me it does give me like a a Wikipedia
thing, a little bit of a and it comes
from AP New. Oh, and it actually is
giving me some good
uh a nice little bibliography here. It's
like, you know, here it is. Wikipedia
plus 14, Reuters plus 7. Uh, a little
bit more information. AP News plus two,
Wikipedia plus one. Uh, here's something
from Vox. So, it tells me where the
sources are, which is really nice. Um,
so you can always go back to those and
it gives you some links to each of
these. So, it does have some usefulness
there. That being said, I don't want to
digress too much. So, here's what I was
thinking about that just sort of came to
me for this season.
How about we take a past season, uh
maybe we go two seasons back where we
had the the challenges, the building
better developer, you know, focused on
building better developers, and we take
each episode and we talk about the
topic, but now we're going to go to AI
and see what AI thinks about it. That's
an interesting. we just basically repeat
the season, same topics, but we're going
to we're going to basically bring in
we're going to interview AI for each one
of those episodes and say, "Well, what
do you think?" And I think it'd be
really interesting to see with some of
them is maybe we do it first with just
like what does AI think about that
topic? And then we take because we could
we probably can take the um transcript I
don't know if it's it may be too big or
take part of the transcript of what we
did maybe our blog summary and shove
that into AI and say you know okay based
on this what are your thoughts or
something like that. So I think like I
think a rehash of that prior season
would be a really fun one to see and it
also is going to I think it's going to
spark some other ideas and things like
maybe new challenges. So, thoughts on
that? Yeah, it's a lot that's a lot of
fun. And by the way, I believe the
transcripts will fit um because our
episodes are small enough that uh we
could we shouldn't have a problem doing
that.
So, we have a season topic. This is
awesome. We're going to take a prior
season topic and we're going to pump it
through AI and see what happens. I'm I'm
already excited to see how this one
goes. I have a feeling it's going to get
really interesting really fast. We'll
try to we're going to have to keep it
short how much we integrate AI because I
have a feeling we're going to have a
commentary on every one of its answers
essentially. All right. So, we have
achieved our goal of a season topic. So,
this season we're going to take the
prior season building better developers
with AI. So, like you could think of it
with like a little uh super script like
with AI now with AI or something like
that. We're just going to we're like
everybody else. We are jumping on the
band bandwagon. We're going to do the
same thing we did. Now, we're going to
add AI and see what happens. And I have
a feeling this is going to be really fun
and and uh educational as well as far as
what a what AI will give us and what
maybe it may maybe where it could may
lead us astray, things like that.
Hopefully, we won't be starting up
Skynet anytime soon based on these
questions. That being said, we're going
to wrap this one up. As always, love to
hear your feedback, your thoughts.
[email protected]. Shoot us an email.
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hey, stuff pops up. We may not be there
yet. Love to add it there. Uh YouTube,
the developer channel, we have got oh
gosh, we've got to have close to a
hundred episodes of the podcast in video
form. And then before that, we've got
I'm I'm pretty sure over 100, maybe 200
different episodes of howto's of mentor
presentations. There's a lot of content
back there. Was working with somebody
just the other day and was just talking
about like my the RV consulting site and
happened to mention, oh, by the way,
there's the developer site and they like
their jaw hit the ground with like
that's a lot of content that like that's
a game-changing amount of content based
on what you were just saying that well,
you know, I've got a few blogs here and
a few things. It's like no, there's a
lot of stuff there. So, I'm just saying
that so that you can go out there and
and take advantage of it. You know,
definitely. And if you have questions
about any of that stuff, no matter how
old it is, we're happy to, you know,
feel that, update the comment, the
content if we need to or whatever it is
to help you become a better
developer today. Go out there and just
be a better human as well as a better
developer. Go out there and have
yourself a great day, a great week, and
we will talk to you next time.
I'm going to start with what would be a
good bonus
content for episode one. Let's see what
that is. So, that's our bonus content
this time around. A great bonus content
idea would be something fun, practical,
and immediately useful helping listeners
reinforce what they've learned or
explore beyond the episode. Here's a few
great options tailored for your casual,
fun, and educational tone. So I'm just
going to go there's like bullet points
with each of these which actually I'll
give you the first one then we'll go
into others. I don't want to get too
far. One play with AI mini lab PDF plus
GitHub link. Provide a downloadable mini
project a simple Python notebook or
sprint or script using transformers
scikitlearn or open AI libraries.
Example build a basic chatbot with GPT
or create an AI generated poem from your
name. It's funny I've used both of those
in some of the stuff I was just going
through. Add comments and links to
resources for each section. GitHub link
with a few branches beginner version
plus stretch goals title playground AI a
15 minute chatbot chatbot
project uh other one extended interview
clip or AMA an extra 5 to 10 minute clip
uh basically some discussion stuff like
that we normally do uh AI glossery quick
uh quick guide a onepage downloadable
PDF with a lot of terms and definitions
uh interactive AI tool list for devs a
curated notion Google doc markdown list
kind of thing. Um, so that's actually
some pretty cool little bonus things.
So, we may have to we may even like ping
AI for our bonus stuff going out of
that. Your thoughts, bonus material from
you? Yeah. So, one of the things uh I
like the playground idea, but uh the
bonus of this, if you are writing
software and you you're just not sure
where to begin with using AI, start with
take a section of code, throw it into
AI, and say, "Write me a test for this."
So, if you're in Java, say, "Write me a
unit JUnit test." If you're in Python, a
pi test, whatever. But start with
testing. see what it does for testing
because you're less likely to break
something through a test than actually
modifying your existing code. So if
you're going to kind of get into AI, I
think coming at it with a test-driven
approach is kind of me a more fun way
because one, you're testing your code,
but two, you find ways of how to test
your code that maybe you never thought
to test or oh, I didn't know the user
could do that. And and you find you
uncover things that you didn't think of.
I think that's actually a perfect
example. I got I I know I gave my bonus
stuff, but I want to add to that. That
is something that I found that is that
kind of repetitive coding stuff that if
you're thinking about it, you sort of
know how you want to, you know, you
there's that sort of list we've talked
about with testing where you want to
test like, you know, the happy path and
when there's missing variables and
there's stuff out of range and stuff
like
that. AI is not going to necessarily get
all of those, but you can add those by
starting with here's my code. write some
tests for it and it's going to give you
a good start. It's going to give you a
good framework and then you can always
say also add tests for A, B, C and D and
it will give you those additional ones
and it's really a good way to get
through testing that can take it can
take a while to write the test. Now I
will warn you sometimes the tests that
it generates are going to cause you
problems but a lot of times the reason
going to cause you problem is because
your code isn't right. that there's
something your code's not catching or
the code's not thinking about and then
it's going to catch it and now suddenly
it's like well that test doesn't succeed
correct because it's not supposed to
because you didn't write the code right.
So there's a lot of things like that
that are uh like the testing thing that
I think are great for AI where it's like
you know there's a bulk of code. It's a
it's a classic create a class that has
these properties and has these methods
and stuff like that. You can get AI to
generate that from a sentence or two
very quickly and then go back and then
tweak the code as you need to. And then
there's there's so many other little
things like that where it's it seems
little. It may save you five or 10
minutes, but if you can, you know, go
from 10 minutes to one minute on a
couple of tasks a day, the next thing
you know, you've saved a half hour, an
hour. So, there really is a lot of value
in that. And I think that's a that's a
perfect place to start is, especially if
you haven't written unit tests, if you
don't know how to test in whatever your
language
is, it will give you a great start on
that and then you can go from there to
build out something that is is much more
valuable. We are going to wrap this one
up. I'm I'm already pumped. I'm so
excited to get into see, you know, two
and three and we've got to go back and
and grab those episode topics and make
sure that we're ready with them next
time around. It's also going to really
mess up though our pre-show because
we're actually going to know what we're
going to talk about each week. This I
haven't done this in gosh, I don't know
how long since the interviews. The
interviews and even then I didn't know
what we're going to talk about. I just
knew who we were going to talk to. So,
it's been a long time since we've come
into an episode essentially knowing what
the episode's going to be about
beforehand. This may test like our
marketing skills because now we can say
next week we're going to talk about this
and we actually know what we're going to
talk about as opposed to join us next
week and see what crazy topic we come up
with. Thank you again for your time,
your patience for putting up with us. I
hope that you are entertained as as we
are with this and moving forward because
I think this is going to be a really
good one. So, if you especially if you
haven't really messed around with AI or
you're not really sure what it can do, I
think it's going to be this season for
you. I think it's going to be really uh
a great introduction into it. It's not
necessarily going to get super deep,
although we might I may go share out
like I've got a a chatbot that I grabbed
from somewhere that was mostly built
through some AI stuff and things like
that. It's like, well, hey, how about
adding this, how about adding that? Uh,
and it uses just that's why I have the
paid version of uh the open AAI of chat
GPT is so that I can use that API and
make some calls and there's some really
cool stuff that comes out of it. So, uh,
we'll see how far we get into it. I've
spent too much time. This is almost off
the rails if not completely. So, go out
there and have yourself a good one and
we will talk to you next time.
[Music]