#451 Claude programming

- Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, episode 451. My name is John Grimzmo. - My name is John Toners. - And this is your manufacturing podcast where we just, John and John have this private conversation and nobody else is listening and we just talk about what's on our minds in our businesses as we grow our manufacturing mini-empires. But nobody's listening. - Nobody's listening. - How are you? - Good, good. We were spring break last week, here this week, and then I get to see you next week. So it's like a good whirlwind and I don't, at the risk of sounding like a bromance. I think this is one of the longest times we've gone without seeing each other. - Maybe the whole pandemic time was a few years there. - Was it? - Not maybe we saw in 2022 at IMPS. - Yeah. - It's been a while. I can't talk to your place, what, two years ago? - Yeah. - I'm happy with the kids. - But yes, it has been a while. So that'll be really good. - You get the crew back together, the team. - Crew back together? - Yeah. - It's gonna be such a good turnout there. I don't even know most of the people that are coming, like that I probably know, you know? - They know you. - Yeah, I know, no, but my point is, I'm gonna be like, oh, you're here. Like, I didn't know you were coming. - Yeah. - It's gonna be great. - So I'll flex on it a little bit to sort of say, not to incur phoma, because at this point, if you're listening, I don't, and you aren't coming. If you can try to make it great, but I suspect it's a bit last minute, but that should occur next year as well. I'm like, when you look at the attendee introductions, it's like, hey, Nick from P3D is crushing it with frigate and homocycid on. This is why I love-- - Yeah, I didn't know what was coming. - Well, and he has, this is exactly what I want to do, but unlike me talking about it, he's already doing it. He has a webcam on his, I think it was on a hot machine, with the AI understands if somebody doesn't put the filter back below the output drain, the fishnet filter like sending them a new nut to be like, hey, somebody didn't put the filter back. That is what I need to be doing more of. Nice excuse for why we're not, I'll happy to elaborate on later, but look, we're getting there. And then another guy just introduced himself, he's like, hey, I'm basically an accountant that focuses on a lot of machine stuff, I'll be talking about some business stuff. It's like, dude, that is awesome. - Yeah, it will be a three days of picking people's brains and wonderful conversation. - In Man with California. - Yes. - You're a man. - I've never been to Man with, no, I've been to California as a kid, but not, I guess I went to LA in 2017, but yeah, yeah, cool. - I'm so excited. - I'm so excited. I'm finally this week getting excited for this trip. - Yeah, it's like sinking in, I'm planning, I'm prepping, I'm packing, I'm like getting some stuff that I need or want for the trip, and I'm like, okay, yeah, it's happening. - Yeah, exactly. - And like, I can feel my work brain starting to shut down, and this is by no means a vacation, but it's a work trip. And it's, yeah, I'm just planning it, and it's, I'm getting jazz. - When are you getting in, you know? - I'm gonna meet you in Denver, I'm pretty sure. - Great. - On that Sunday flight, you're on that Sunday, yeah, like, go one o'clock flight to Mimuth or whatever. - I literally think it's a, effectively a charter flight at this point. - Yeah, we're gonna own that plane. - From Denver to Bishop. Like, if you are part of this crowd, I'm just gonna toss your purse. (laughing) - I'm sorry. - It's gonna be so cool. It'll be weird to have your assigned seating and to sit next to somebody you know. Like, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, that's right. I appreciate it. I introduced myself on the Discord yesterday, 'cause it's the right thing to do. - I'm a gentleman a bit. - Yeah. - I tied you, 'cause I was like, introduced my wife who's coming in and granted, who's coming with some side of four. And then somebody DM me like four seconds later, and I was like, dude, why are you introducing yourself? I'm like, no. I enjoy, I can't enjoy. - Because I can't enjoy. - I don't know you. - Well, that's what I'm saying. Like, I enjoy meeting people in this industry that don't know who I am. It's actually like lovely. And, looking forward to it really. - So we don't know what John, I was just talking. We think we'll try to report next week, but we just don't know what that looks like. - Denver. - Yep. - Absolutely. - And then the following week, I'm still in California. So I might be available soon. - Oh, good. - A call, but dude. - Oh yeah. - Honestly, that's fine because, well, I'll go either way. We were probably on a Wednesday, the day before that, our VF6 is leaving. That won't be crazy busy for me, but on Wednesday, the day we record our Okuma M660 arrives, and then which is probably all hands on deck, and the day thereafter our DUSON DNM6700 arrives. - Okay, so I'm the opposite. I'm booked on Tuesday, Wednesday, not sure yet. - Okay. - Flying home Thursday. - So you were skipping that week after. - Yeah, like I said, I will figure it out, but cool. - Yeah, so I'm, you know, we're at the show, kind of Sunday to leave Thursday morning, and then I'm in California for another week. - Good for you. - I have six shop tours lined up. And if you want to share, - Gonna film everyone. I'll share all of them when I get back. - Okay. - I'm getting a guided tour of SpaceX from an employee who's a customer of ours. - Awesome. - It's like you can bring your phone but you can't film anything. I'm like, okay, bummer. - Yeah. - It's like make sure you bring a valid passport too because you're a forminer. - Yeah. - So that's cool. And then yeah, a bunch of other precision shops. Like the goal of my trip is ultra precision. So I've got some, I'm gonna go see Adam and Lady Machine Tech. And some really cool stuff that I am very eager to film and share. So my past few days has been figuring out, like my goal of the trip is to travel as light as possible. Because I want to be footloosen fancy for you in California. I don't want to have a suitcase that I'm lugging around. Like I want to be able to walk around the outskirts of LA or what, whenever city I'm in. - Oh, sure, sure, sure. - So I'm trying to pack everything into a backpack, including my ski gear. - Yeah. - Like my Gore-Tex. So it's been interesting. And then I want to film these six shop tours, probably more by the time I get there. So I bought some DJI cameras. I bought the Osmo Pocket 3, which is the stick with the Gimmel on top. - Yeah. - The little head. - So the thing that looks like the camera we got forgotten, 'cause it's so freaking small. - It's so small. It's like the pack of his starburst. The size of the starburst, you know, candy. - Yeah. - It's incredible. - Yeah. And then I also got the DJI Osmo Nano, which is a tiny little, like, the whole assembly is a GoPro, except the whole bottom half of it, detaches the screen portion. And you're left with basically half of a GoPro as just a screen and one button to turn it on. - Oh. - And you can flip the screen around. You can have the screen remote and it's still like sinks and live records. So you can have the camera on the shelf behind a book or whatever, and you can like have the screen over here. - I look this up. - DJI Nano. - Yeah. It's really cool. So I filmed on my Instagram. What's that? - I'm swearing on our family family from the podcast saying, "Damn you, "'cause I've resisted upgrading my. " - I know. I've done the research for you, and I'll show you on the trip. Like I'll see you next week. So I have used both cameras now to film various videos for Instagram. They both film natively vertical or horizontal easily. With the DJI app, I can send files immediately to my phone. Or I can pull them to my phone, and then I've gotten really good at editing on my phone right now. So I can like film something pretty complex, and I can pull it to my phone. I can edit it right there, and I can have it uploaded within. It still takes time. I filmed, I don't know if you saw my one from last night, talking about the Norseman, using it to cut some cardboard. It's a good edit. Took me probably three hours to like film and edit the whole thing. - Holy cow. - But it was good practice for the camera, and it was good, because I wanna be proficient on the equipment for the trip, and I wanna be able to film like really cool shop tours. - Yeah. - So good little cinematic, little angles and shots and splices and overlays, and it was fun. - What are you doing for audio? Or do you get hands on the audio? - It comes with those little mics. The wireless mics. - Cool, the DJI, the labs. Okay, yep, yep, yep. - So it syncs right to them? - Okay. - And it's great. - I filmed a shop update before spring break, and then I started to edit it on spring break, and I just deleted all the footage. - Oh yeah. - Because I was also using, coincidentally, the DJI mics. - Yeah. - But even the lav mic from them on a shirt collar when you're walking around our shop, I would argue that our shop isn't particularly loud from like an overall decibel standpoint, but there's just lots of fans, motors, parts, chips, and the audio quality was not fun to listen to. And I said, I need to stop this, I need to figure it out. And $43 part makes for magical, perfectly clean audio and noisy shop. Ready? - Yeah. - It's one of those, some metal wire mic, I think it's called like a, here I'll take my headset off here and say, so it goes around my ears, and it comes through, it's like what you see speakers at public stage speakers where. - So does it look cool? - Not particularly. - Do I care what is it? - What is it? - Roe cares, give it a whore. I'll talk. - No, but it's a tiny microphone that pushes right in front of your face. - Yes, it's a microphone that then just has a three millimeter jack that plugs into the DJI wireless thing. It is called a, I got it from Amazon J, K, professional headset. Mike, $46. Here I'll just send you the link. - No, I see it in my. - You see it again, yeah. So here's what's even more cool. I tried it on in the same footage, walking through our shop, like A beat it with regular DJI lab mic, and then with this on. It is so good that you don't hear anything in the shop, and it sounds like I'm overdubbing it from a sound control. - Whoa. - I'm like, well, that's not good, because it actually is a problem. So then I wear the other DJI lab mic on my collar. That grabs some of the ambient, but then we actually just filmed a shop update video, which I'm gonna launch today. - Yeah. - And I want to turn that down. - And to grant, to have him explain something, I just handed him the extra mic. So then he has good audio. I'm like, oh, this is such a win. - Cool. Well, that's cool, man. I like it. Yeah, I did some testing both at home and at quiet house, but also in the shop with the onboard mic on the cameras, and with the remote mic. And they both sounded fine to me. The lab mic or the remote receiver Bluetooth mic, whatever it's called, sounded better, and it was louder audio, but more direct from my voice. But both of them were acceptable enough. It was like fine. I like walked right up to a machine that was running, and I like, yeah, sounded all right. - Because you're using a DJI camera system, do you still have to use this part of the mic? - No, no. It's a receiver. It's built in. - Oh, that's a lot of room. - I have that same kit, and I cannot use those mics with the new cameras. It comes with new mics, or I have to buy extra new mics. - Oh, okay. - It's still a camera. - Yeah, reviewers online were complaining. They're like, couldn't the engineers have made some cross-compatibility here? Like, this is kind of lame. I already have all this stuff, and now I can't use it with the new cameras. But yeah. - Good to find. - Yes, so it's like, I bought the Pocket 3, which is the gimbal camera first, and played with it over the weekend. I was like, "This is the greatest thing ever." And then the Nano came in a couple days later, and I played with that last night, and I'm like, "This is the greatest thing ever." Which one am I going to use? I'm going to use them both. But they have kind of different purposes, and it's, it's going to be so good. - I didn't press you, you're going to try to do 10 plus day trip with the back-back. - Yeah. - No check-back then? - No, no sharpie pointy things. - So I'm having a local friend custom make a duffle bag for me, and my requirements were, I want this to pack down into nothing, but to still be durable enough that I can trust TSA, and like, you know, it's not getting punctured or torn or anything like that. So it's made of like the best ripstop nylon, and it's a local bag maker. And so I'm going to check that with all my bulky stuff, my clothes, and my knives stuck in the pockets. So I can bring my three knives on the plane. But then that duffle will shove into my backpack, and we'll pack light. So that's my plan, my goal. If I have to like, buy clothes along the way, I'll figure it out, but yeah, it should be fine. - So that's a funny like life thing that, this is not particularly insightful comment, other than like, I'm like a pretty like, I think generally like, through a good guy. But like, you realize like, oh, if I need to buy some suit and then just throw it away on a trip, it's wasteful, so I don't love it. Like, big deal. You spend more on an appetizer at a nice restaurant sometimes. - Exactly. - And that. - Yep. And I've never actually had that mentality, but I've kind of wanted to be able to travel like that at some point. Like, I've always, you know, wanted to just show up at the airport and be like, okay, I'm just going to go here with nothing, but what's in my pockets? I usually give my pockets pretty stocked, but. - Yeah. - Nothing goes for it's in my pocket, but stand by while I do a pocket dump. - Exactly. I just got to leave my knife in the car for this trip, but I can buy one when I'm out. I was talking with Dave for a size about that, because that dude travels everywhere all the time for all reasons. - Yeah. - And I was like, have you ever done that? Just like, gone to the airport with nothing? He's like, yeah, a couple times. Just buy some cheap clothes whenever you're at the place. It's like, it's fine. - Yeah. - I'm like, yeah, I want to be like that. And it's annoying to come home from a trip and unpack and realize you didn't touch half your stuff. - 100%. - I'm over that. I don't want that anymore. So I'm pretty frugal and pretty specific with, you know, how many socks and underwear, how many T-shirts, how many, what can I actually do realistically to get through this trip and not over pack? - Yeah. - Because that's dumb. What I'm curious about is the skiing temperatures. Like April skiing in California. Is this going to be T-shirt weather or do I need to bring my big gloves? Like, I don't know yet. - I think it's going to be spring skiing, but you should check. I'm like, not great sure, by the way. Here's the other thing, Jon. I like don't mind. I'm packing my skis. I don't mind throwing a few layers of-- - You're bringing skis. - Yeah. - Yeah. It's just easy. - Yeah. - I almost said the same thing as bringing two pairs of gloves. And I'm like, okay, I'll be fine. Like, I'll bring my-- - You say, like, if you want me to like pack some, say this high for you, I'm happy to. I don't care. - But that defeats the point. - No, I'm, I think you get a haul pass when it's a ski trip. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah. - But no, I should be good. - Yeah. - Dude, awesome. I'm like, sorry for you. - Yeah, I'm getting pumped for this trip. Both the mammoth portion is going to be amazing. And then the rest of my tour trip is going to be awesome too. - Yeah. - I did find a ride from mammoth to California. - Oh, yeah. There's a hint to the bear. - Yeah, it's going to be really good. - It's awesome. - Yep. - So sweet. - This is about as a random of transition as they come, but I'm reading a book called "Shantaram" or "Shantaram" and it is popular, but I'm not sure if I haven't heard of it. And it's about a, it's like a allegedly true story, but probably has some literary liberties in it of a gentleman who escaped from prison in Austria or New Zealand. And then kind of serotonously made his way to India and it's sending period of time in India, going through some frows, tribulations of life, and meeting people and living in the slums, and traveling, and getting robbed. And I'm only about a third of the way through the book, but it is a, for not traveling, like for just sitting on your couch and reading a book, it's like a very eye-opening thing about just kind of a different way of life. And it very much speaks to what you just said about, like, it'll be okay. Like, I'll figure out how to get to San Francisco. I'll figure out how to make it do without a full back fight. Like, I'm trying to put myself in these situations. Yeah. Because we live a very comfortable life, generally, and it's like, no, it's fine. Yeah. So, it'll be fine. You'll make it work. Yeah. And as I joke with the kids, and now that I have grown up money, like to be able to buy a pair of swim shorts when you're out, is literally no big deal. Like, by no means wealthy, but I can buy a pair of swim shorts if I need it. Well, and like, long, irrelevant story, but like, we were on a weird thing for spring break last week. We just brought a shipping label with us. Oh. And then found a box, just a lot to label on it, and shipped a small boxes at home, just not to deal with something. Like, he's nice. Yeah. $13, and you just can't have a sudden toll, have much to carry off. Smart. Yeah. All right. We allegedly skipped our list, but whatever. It's fine. Yeah. Didn't have much anyway. Yeah. That's what you have. Okay. Two things that are relatively quick. Number one, Claude is like light years better than Chad GBT. Like, I don't know that I ever longed to Chad GBT again. For day to day, like, answer your questions. Well, so for reasons, I don't understand. It got super slow for me for the past three days, which may be kind of a, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm just like, I don't care if it's not working. And I don't know how to fix it. I'm now open to suggestions. And then I've been in Claude for the past three or four days, working on a mix of work stuff and not work stuff. It's just, it's so much better. And then the last thing I asked Sid to do was coincidentally, how to deal with getting the, what's it called, a quadratic encoder output from a linear DRO into a Python script on a computer. And so it's just like, yep, not hard. You can read very pi pico, 3.3 volts, all the law. And I was like, yep, great. Can you just give me like, explain like I'm five graph of that? And Shadjee, BT often would do like stick art, like ASCII art, or whatever. No, this thing did like just created like a beautiful graphical, properly done illustration of it. It's faster. Like I'm just like, this is interesting. Not really sitting here trying to make a point other than, yeah. I was just very comfortable using Chadjee, BT. And now I'm like, great. Claude is interesting. I have not tried Claude yet, but I'm using Chadjee, BT for kind of word-based stuff. And then cursor for programming stuff. And like Rob Listell in our chat, he said the separation is really nice. Like having a conversation here with no commitment. And then the code is like, you just have the context you need to write me the code. We're not having a conversation with random stuff. But yeah, I've heard a continue here to good here. Continue to hear good things about both Claude and cursor for programming. Yeah. Which is good. The other thing is I, for years now, have used this Google Sheets as my I just like to do list tracker. It has worked well. But I, two things I don't like about it. Number one, when I open the Google Sheets app on my phone, it is not up to date. It takes sometimes a few seconds to refresh. And if I have a specific sheet or the home page, with all the sheets in it, you know, I go directly into the file. I mean, in it's like a cash version for a split-side. - Okay, but it's more, if I don't have a great connection, I've googled it, it should've looked it up. There isn't a way to force it to sink in the background. - Got it. - Basically, there isn't a way around this so far. I know, and where that's really annoying is if I'm really busy, and I just want to pop it open to add something as a note, you can't do that because you're waiting for it to refresh before you like add something. The other thing I learned is when I open it to kind of a dump of something in my head, you can't not look at other stuff there, and that's not what I want to be doing. I really want to just be-- - You want to add a note. - Yeah. - So on Spring Break, I was like, let's solve it. And in about seven minutes, I wrote a Google Form webpage that has its own URL that I now bookmarked on my phone. And when I go to that webpage, all it has is an input field and a button, and when I go to that field, I type what I want, I hit submit, and it depends it to the Google Sheets. I never have to go into the sheet, and actually it's even better because now, let's say I'm not for a walk, and I had three things when I get back. I know, no, I sort of need or want to process those three things. Are they immediate to do so? Are they just ideas? Like it gives me a framework to work those in. I love it. - I had timestamps, the automatically for you. - Thank you. - Yep, that's how we've been doing our buyer's choice sign up forms. - Like for nine years. - Okay. - Through a Google Form into a Google Sheet, different use case, but similar like that entry kind of thing. And I like that for you. That's really cool. - Yeah, that's good. - Nice. I told you a couple of weeks ago, but I remade our GERP ERP system, Grimsmo ERP for GERP. From scratch, using cursor, database driven, no longer spreadsheets, through app sheets, and it's insane. It's so good. And if it's not good, I fix it. And I have a feature request tracker built into this site that I or anybody on our team can add a feature request. And we actually had a really hard time getting it to work on Apple phones, with the login and cookies and tokens and all this stuff. And so back and forth with cursor, back and forth, still not working. So I built the feature requests to be like a text chat. So I can add a text, like a comma comment, like in WhatsApp, it looks just like WhatsApp, but the bubbles over here and the bubbles over here. So I can continue to add context as a text chat. What's the best word for this? - Reward, rewind. Let's say I'm an employee at Grimsmo, and I'm like, hey, you need to add a feature request. - I really want the lathe to be able to tell me when it is on fire and going to burn to the ground. - If GERP has that information. But more specifically, say purchase orders doesn't work in GERP because this vendor is whatever. Like it's not displaying the information properly or if something's broken or a link doesn't work or when I click on the PDF link, it doesn't open up into a new window, like a technical thing or a request. Like a, I wish it showed me this. So you go to the click on feature request and you type in your request and you hit submit and it creates a, just like in WhatsApp or in your texting app on your phone, bubbles, like John's understood this, John Grims most said this. And so each person can have their own text bubble and you can add context. And then when I tell cursor, scrub all feature requests for ones where I have checkmarked cursor ready 'cause that's my final like, there's enough context for cursor to run it. - I see. - Then it not only reads every text bubble, every conversation point, but it adds its own and says, I did this in a very summary like two sentences. I fixed it by doing this. So the Apple phone is not working. It said, okay, I tried to increase the latency of the cookie, it happens with Safari browsers, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm like, okay, I don't really care. - Yeah, I don't care. - And then it didn't work. So then I would add another update text bubble that says still didn't work, we're getting this error. It works for eight seconds. It's things for eight seconds and then it goes, oh, that's because we had an eight second timer and blah, blah, blah. And so you're having this long historical conversation, like it's one thing to have it in Chuchu Petit or in cursor and all that conversation doesn't matter really 'cause you're just trying to solve the problem. You don't go back to it. This gives us a little bit of historical track of the feature request and how they were solved. And then I can now say, I'll fix it like we fixed that one. - Oh, sure. - And there's a bit of history there that says that. So anyway, the group has been amazing. Using it primarily for purchase orders and RFQs now, we've never had RFQs before. - RFQs two out of vendors. - Up to vendors, yeah. - Sure, sure. - And then, let me just look at it real quick. So we have that. We have a whole vendors list. It really helped to have all this data in previous group, which helped me import a lot of it, like Telkurs, automatically imported all. Items is like every, ideally every physical thing in the company from the current to each end mill. Process plans are a big thing we're implementing. We're gonna track every single operation and every single time and eventually apply cost to that so that we can really start to see like, when we make damage deal blades, are we actually making any money? Or is it just like a ton of work? And yes, we charge a lot for it, but is it paying out? Right now we have no visibility, no idea. So we need that. That's gonna be sweet. I have a task section, which is like the ongoing to-do list where I could assign an employee a task and it's just lives in there until it gets done and then we can all check it. Shopify Live is a really sweet section where I can use the API from Shopify to see visibility in-group of all of our products that we've ever made. - Yeah. - And since we upload a new Shopify page for every single product we've ever made. - Oh my gosh, yeah. - Make sure you have 20,000 products, entries. And in-group now I can sort them, I can filter them, I can search for a specific keyword and it scrubs the whole database on Shopify syncs it with our database. And so I can type DLC and I can tell you, how many DLC saws has we've ever made? How many damage deal blades we've ever made? And it's already paid off. It's already showed some really good data 'cause you search for damage deal and it shows 77. And I showed that to Eric and he's like, we've only made 77 damage deal knives ever. And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, - Really? - And he's like, "I still suck at it." Because it's like, I don't have enough practice. That's crazy. - I know. So Gurb, from a technical side, it's not just one Python script or one file. It's like a whole, it's like I assume it's on Git and I'm so forth. - Yep, it's on Git and it's hosted and it's database driven with a Postgres database. So all this stuff is stored in multiple databases and it's a web page based with a react front end, apparently, and things like that. So it's a web browser that's fully secure and locked and password controlled. And as we build it out, I wanted to do everything that we wanted to do that we were used in this company. And that's the problem I've had with other ERPs that I've tried and spent money on and spent a lot of time on. They're better for job shops or they're better or they're like one size fits most or they're not for us. And maybe that's a me thing, but I mean, on one hand, manufacturing is manufacturing. Every business should be the same and run by the same core principles, but like, I don't know, I'm super picky. I want it the way I want it. And if you can't do what I want, I'm not happy with it. - Yeah, I think you're right. I think there's probably things we're not aware of. Like it might make sense to use business one for, you know, Oracle or somebody, if you need a standing ISO certification platform, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I think the other sort of obvious point is that like, it is now become so easy to reinvent the wheel that we will be reinventing the wheel to be the exact wheel we want. - Exactly. - Well, as we've heard from people trying to get their AS certifications, a lot of those pre-existing ERP systems like will guide you through it, but it sounds like it's really just about capturing the certain information and being able to call that out, being able to present it, being able to track it, and you could easily build a system that does that for you. I think. - Trying to like, not debate this, but think to think like, what are we missing? And in our shop update video that it'll be out by the time this airs, I walk over to Grant and he shows off the thing that we already put up on Instagram, but Grant, who great machinist, like has gotten more comfortable with robots and PLCs and click are in post, but like not a software programmer and has never written a web page or program in his life, use Clawed to write a really good looking web interface to take digital metrology, measure stuff, decide when to push it, log a database, files on it, and then push this off, says via the fan's focus, fan of focus to over to the will and then. And like this looks like something you use, thousands of dollars with a software company across the period of weeks or months to do, and Grant's just like, yeah, I did it a couple days all those don't have stuff. And he's got the initiative and intelligence, the confidence, but everybody should now. Like if you want to do this, you can. And so what I was trying to think in my head was like, if you were walking in and buying a company that you wasn't an industry you knew and you had a junior or a mid-level person who looked like they were reinventing the wheel, riding custom software at one point, you'd be like, ah, let's just not reinvent the wheel here. Let's make sure we're just buying it from vendors can give us support, a framework, and if you end up leaving, what are we left with? Now I'm like, just don't care. - Right. - You just grab that, you screenshot it or find the code and be like, hey, this doesn't work. You just, you just, exactly. - Well, like I have one of my neighbors was an accountant, he's now retired, but he was an accountant at a distillery for like 30 years or something like that. And he, even as an accountant, he went the hard way and he like wrote his own accounting software. And like the internal process tracking and the databases and all that stuff. So it's been actually fun to have him to bounce ideas off of. But he did it the hard way and it took years to like make these softwares, but it did everything they ever wanted. And it was sweet. And this is actually my dad's story too throughout his whole career. - Yeah, sure. - But so my neighbor basically said, and then once the company got acquired by Big Conglomerate, they came in with their big SAP software and everybody hated it and it was just, bad, 'cause it didn't do what they wanted. It didn't do what they were used to for one, but it also just took years to onboard. And it was like clunky and bad. It doesn't do what you want. And yeah, I don't know those days are changing man. And I think about that for our company too. Like if I were no longer here and the company had to keep going and I've made all these custom weird stuff, nobody in the company currently knows how to deal with that. But it's still possible to people like you said with Grant has they drive the initiative and the intelligence to pull it off. - 100% - And yeah, it's just like any, with any technology, even though this stuff feels so accessible to you and me, we're like nerds for this stuff right now. And I still don't think most people are gonna adopt this for a while still. - I don't know John. Like I want to know more. Like we read a dinner party and I wanted to hear more about other people, how are you using AI? Like don't try to impress me. I just like, like, whole simply want to know what are you doing? Are you uploading your tax return to see if it can find stuff? Are you asking me to do Excel modeling? Are you asking it or interior renovation? Like I don't care. I just want to know. That's one of the reasons I enjoy our friendship is like, you know, you get to two similar guys that still see other stuff through our journey in life. So I want to know more, but like I don't want to underestimate how much people are using it. - Yeah. - Yeah. - That's good. - Yeah, it's cool. - So I did want to ask you on that. You've talked about before, in Lex, you have what I'm calling internal purchase orders. But like when the guy on the floor needs to buy a thing, what is the workflow for that? - What kind of thing? - So like, oh, I need these NMels from McMaster or I need a thing, but he's not gonna hit purchase. He's flagging a request. I need, we need more of this. Don't you have like a shopping cart kind of system in Lex? - I just want to make sure I'm understanding the question. So right now I'm gonna go into our order queue. And so the quick sort of disclaimer here, there are things we don't have in Lex, you know, paper towels aren't in Lex. And even some one off stuff isn't in Lex. But in certain vendors like McMaster do such a good job on a shared persistent cart that anybody can log into McMaster and just add stuff to the cart, the fast food is just every Thursday. So that's how that kind of works. But right now we have Seal Vendor, a outside service vendor, an aluminum vendor and a tooling vendor have items in the order queue. And then each vendor has certain notes about it. It's like some like host tooling that's free shipping. So we just don't really care what order that as soon as we, others we order when it hits a certain point or once a week Serena monitors that. So there's some tribal labor involved in how that gets monitored. But like YG1 is a good example. Right now we have one Carbisentred drill in there, quantity 15, but only one of them, $173 total purchase. That will probably sit there. It tells me who put that in the cart. - Nice. - So we know, we're gonna ask if we have questions about it, but also when the market's doing the right service. And then it says right now, it's been in the cart for 1.2 days and there'll be an email reminder generated in three days to make sure it gets ordered so that we don't just accidentally read it there forever. - Yes. - Any other questioner? Yes, it does. Well, yeah, I wanted to hear how you use it 'cause we don't have the system like that right now. Yes, we all add to the McMaster cart, but I'm hitting purchase or Angela's hitting purchase. Same for ULINE, like we'll send a text to everybody, "Oh, if you need any ULINE stuff, "let us know by Tuesday 'cause we're ordering." But it's all the littler stuff. It's like like enmills or bandsaw blades or weird things. I'm just trying to figure out what is the least stressful way to funnel this all to a purchasing person or kind of time schedule. Maybe it can be done by me or Spencer, or Angela or something like that, but yeah. I like that. What do you call that? - So we have all our inventory items and so there has to be some way for you to know what to order. You can search it, there's a Lex ID, you can scan a barcode, we don't have to be clear, but you could, if you have barcodes. And then you just hit add to cart and it goes into the order queue. - Okay. - And anybody could immediately push it. If Grant needs more aluminum for order, he can add to the cart and just immediately push. Well, that's an RFQ, so it'll come back and it has to get converted to it. - But it's a port to a PO, in process, basically. - Exactly. And that we were just talking about doing potentially doing some more permissions, limiting stuff. It's not something we are worried about, but it's also probably quite appropriate to have to make sure a brand new in turn doesn't order $14,000 for the steal. - Yep. - Actually don't really care about that app, it's because you can't, you couldn't do that in a malicious way at this point, but nevertheless, and you and I talked about, we have a, I have a review system that I get every Friday. I don't know if that was off the air or the other. - What you got? - Every Friday I get a report of all of the past week appeals sorted with the total, by total dollar amount, with a price change relative to the past three times we've ordered that. - Yes. - So for materials or car buy or cardboard, even, I get to see, oh man, we've ordered that three times in the past 18 months and the price just went up 37%. Well, when that's a 14 cent screw, I don't really want to spend a ton of time worrying about it, but when it's a $4,000 and $43 piece of aluminum, it's like, hey, now we need to check our margins, our pricing. - Mm-hmm. Yep, and remembering as I built GERP 3.0, I'm calling it, I was thinking about that conversation where you were telling me about that pricing history and the report and all that stuff. So I started to build that into GERP 2, so you can click on any vendor and it shows every PO associated with that vendor ever. And then on each item page, you can have a pricing history tracker that just shows you a little graph and the freedom to do all this is like so liberating. And what I want now is feedback from my team with ideas, be like, you know, be great is if we had, Angela had one right away. If on the vendor page, when you click on vendor and it drops down and it shows every purchase order we've ever made from them with the totals on the side, he's like, can we add that up at the bottom and see how many dollars we've spent in our DLC coding place? I was like, yeah, yeah, we can by the next day I had it done. And it was like instantly really cool. You'd be like, well, we spent how much of that company? Like, okay, we're not a small fish to them. Like, again, I wish this podcast were not public 'cause what I would sort of privately tell you to push you is like, this is so easy with AI now. It still takes a lot of back to work. - It does. - But John, you shouldn't be doing this anymore. I don't see anybody else in the company doing it, to be honest, like right now. But it would be great if I had that. - Both 'cause you need to be doing better stuff, but also you will be better at a value as an outside observer to this. - Yeah, maybe the one in the weeds. - Yeah, 'cause it has taken probably over 100 hours to do what I've done so far. Like, it's a lot of time. - Which is so incredible. Like I'm not, like it's great. But it's like, we make it sound easy, but it is still time-consuming. And there's still like, on the more advanced side, database management and you get hub uploading. It's not easy, it'll probably get easier over the years. - But it's hard. But especially if you found somebody who happens to potentially be younger and much more in, so I just want to go into a close mind about it. And I know the recurring things that we've had, like you will be better when you're in a place where you're just like, great, do I want to work on a new product today or do I want to work like not, group is on my shoulders. - Well, I'm choosing to work on the product of group is where I'm at right now because I want it for my company. But yeah, getting to the point where I can add all the future requests and then somebody else can manage the implementation of all that. Be great. - That's what I was gonna ask, though when I asked about the technical side of the group, this is just a dumb question I don't understand. is let's say your GERF is 74-file, it doesn't matter. Like different Python or Java, it doesn't matter. Different programming files. In cursor or cloud or whatever, if you're like, okay, I wanna update the PDF, it doesn't work. So I wanna switch the way we're parsing PDFs with this. How does it know to see your whole code base and realize it doesn't have to update all 74-files with a full Git bubble byte? Just like, okay, it's two or two files I'm gonna replace. So cursor does that naturally. It knows the whole code base because the way cursor works is you sync your entire GitHub locally on your C drive. It doesn't work on a shared Google drive, by the way. I used to have it on my, I'm like, yeah, let's put it in Google so I can have it on my work computer as well. There's synch issues and everybody complained. So I have it on my C drive at home and I have the entire code base on my C drive. And then I push that to GitHub when it's ready for upload basically. So then cursor has access to every subfolder within this main folder that I tell it to. You basically open cursor with this folder. And then you just say, yeah, you know the purchase order page? It's not generating the PDF properly or can you move, you know, in the generated PDF 'cause you move my email to the bottom and put it on the right, make it blue and underline like it should be, things like that. So I just have to specify like, yeah, on the PO page. And it knows the difference between PO and purchase order. I can just shorthand everything. It just knows. And we built everything into modules. So there's the purchase order module. There's the Shopify Live module. - Oh, you sure that's smart. - So it can just hone in. And then I can relate to because sometimes two different modules will have similar features or like I want them to look the same. Make purchase orders look like we did on vendors 'cause I like that look. Make feature requests, you know, big and bold like it is on the other one. And it rarely have I ever broken anything else by making a change on something else, which is great. You know, that's always the concern. I've definitely broken it a couple times, but whatever you'd be like, oh, nothing's working anymore. Yeah. And you just feedback and it goes, yeah, no problem. Yeah, sorry. It's been fun. Good, that's awesome. But yes, now that I'm, as I call it, coming up for air from a deep project like that, now it's maintenance and addition. And I'm getting the team to use it. We went live on it after one week, like live after one week. And the old group is dead to me already. And I was able to import all of the data. So every purchase order we've ever made 'cause it was spreadsheet based. So it's all there and you can park it. Easy. So every purchase order, every price, every vendor, every everything is already, I have a starting point for the new one, which is awesome. So yeah, now that that's kind of done, I'm getting, as I told you, really excited about filming and media and marketing and like pushing that. So that's gonna be a big push for me. Blatos coming up in a couple months, you know, the man with the thread. It's crazy. And I definitely want to get back into product design and updates and things like that. So yeah, it's always lots to do. Awesome. So when we're in California, can you show me group? On the phone? Yes, okay. Okay, sweet. Yep, that'd be cool. Yeah, it works good on the phone. But because there's so many columns, you have to like scroll sideways sometimes. Okay. Which is fine. I'm just accepting it for now. Sure. I'm realizing the challenge of making a wide desktop view and a narrow mobile view with a lot of data is actually like really hard. Do you want to be able to use on your phone though? All the time. Yeah. Like I want access in bed. I want to like, Do you want to see it? No. Sorry. No. Mostly just to answer a question. Yeah, it's like, how much damn is still do we have? I'm curious if we have that pattern. Oh yeah, we ordered it last time. We should have it. Little little stuff like that. Yeah. That's cool. I wanted to show you a video. I don't think we put this up yet, although I'm happy to. So the way we make our top shots, we always end up with a burr that's rolled under the inside of an occluded edge. You showed me the video. Yeah, and so I, we scotch-prite him. And I was like, okay, as part of the phase two of our robot system, phase one is just getting stuff to work day shift. There's actually more nuances to these phases, but phase two of phase three will start lights out and then start adding robot capabilities before and after the machine value that it's services or functions. And so take a look at this. It's pulling the part through. And it's actually this really satisfying ASMR sound. Unfortunately, one of the big drawbacks to this project was we had to use a lathe holder and a lathe tool bin. That's what I thought it was. So explain it to me like a listener. Okay, so it's basically using a lathe, like a CNMG insert held statically at an angle. So it's almost like a scraper, if you will, and or a shaper. And it's taking the jaw and it's pushing the jaw into a 3D fixture, 3D printed fixture. And it's running it along the x-axis where the tool is now mounted, such that it just knocks that burr off with the cutting edge. And then we'll probably still want to have either like a stone or a scotch bright that will help finish it, if you will. But already this is almost good. - Good, yeah, yeah. - And it's like, okay, great. Now we can have this part being taken out of the machine and have it now deeper. - Yeah, so now we don't have to worry about the machining of that burr in a second off or anything like, we can accept it off the machine and fix it automatically in the un gripping cycle. - Yeah, it has to. - It just wins, it's just winning. - Yep, yep. - Yeah, cool. - And the last thing I've had on my rolling to do list is I want to reach out, I probably reach out to a guy at Kenna Metal, 'cause I got to know some of the guys at Kenna Metal through toolpath. But I think we need to finally buck up and order custom step drills. And here's what's tricky. - Like for your fixture plate, million holes a day that you do. - Exactly. And so if you think about our average fixture plate, let's just stick with aluminum because it's actually done. It's the more interesting example. - Really? - Everything's the hero in aluminum. - Yeah, yeah. Well, so what makes the interesting is that we farm tap them. And so when you farm tap, the swaging action of the farm tap does raise up some material. So you basically, you can't, you have to chamfer after the drill. - You can't chamfer big enough before the drill? - Well, so that's kind of the question. If our fixture plates have a threaded section and then they have a large counter bore. And let's assume for now, let's assume that we still reename or bore the precision. With a high quality high end PCD drill, we may actually not need to reen because some of these drills are so accurate, but let's set that aside for now. Then we chamfer it. So it's right now, it's a bunch of operations. It's drilling for the farm tap. Then it's, we're actually rough drilling the larger diameter. Then we're form tapping it. Then we're coming in to chamfer the, it's the chamfer the 90 degree shoulder edges on the counter bore on the top of the face. And then we're coming in with like a remur or boring head and doing the precision bore. So it's five operations. I think if we actually took the time to design a form drill, what we could do is the form drill would be quite complicated in its shape because it would have the form tap diameter drill and the majors with the chamfer's built in, but it would also have a relief area so that when the form tap occurs, that material can flow into an area that doesn't smuck up your ability to start a thread, start to screw. In which case you could get down, go from five to two tools. You would literally form drill everything, including your chamfer's thread or form tap. And then potentially still have to precision machine the bore, but maybe not. What do you think? I like it. Yeah, I've heard of people, Angeles mentioned it too, of having custom step drills made. It doesn't suit what we need, but yeah, apparently it's common enough in especially higher volume industry. There's probably lots of companies that do it. What, I don't need the specifics, but what sort of you just think in a carbide step drill or something fancy? Carbide, well, so that's one of the questions I need to ask because PCD are usually, I believe, just like brazed insert sections. So it might be the case, certainly the drill will be carbide. It won't be like high speed seal or something lower, if you will. But the precision section could be PCD if we needed it, if that was worth it. I think it has to do more than just save, it has to do five things because if it just does two things, it's not worth getting to buy five drills. They're four to seven hundred dollars each. They take eight weeks to get, like it has to be juicier return, but we really need that return 'cause aluminum pricing has really compressed the margins there. And so cycle time really does matter more about, hey, let's make these plates. In a way that doesn't compromise the quality either. Of course. - Not a cool challenge. Yeah. Curious to see how it goes. - Yeah. - So I, it's been on my list. - Sweet man. - What else? - Last thing I have is, I was on Spencer's podcast the other weekend. - Thank you. G live and it was an absolute pleasure and a joy to get get back together with Spencer and yeah have that conversation and we mostly talked about AI programming as well Yeah, super enjoyed the FG. I don't enjoy it when Spencer misses, but maybe the address mutual. Yeah, no, it was good to hear you on that good It was so yeah That's all yeah see you guys. So I'll see you Sunday morning sounds good cool man. Take care. All right, bye [BLANK_AUDIO]