Claude Code Can Be Your Second Brain

No briar might have the coolest clawed code set up I've ever seen. He rigged a home server in his basement, put his obsidian vault in it, and then runs clawed code on top. So he can think, research, write, and even ship code right from his phone. Today he shows us how he uses clawed code as a true second brain, a thinking partner, that asks him sharp questions, pulls research from his whole note archive and the web, and even keeps a running log of what he's learned and what his best ideas are. And he walks us through his whole stack and his whole workflow. If you want to learn how to use clawed code as a true second brain, this is the episode to watch. Let's dive in. Noah, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Excited to have you. It's really good to get to chat. This is our first interview in probably like five years. You are one of the, for people who don't know, you're one of the first super organizers, interviews, that was the newsletter that turned into every. And I love the way that your brain works. You have this like really interesting taste for tools for thought. And back in the day, you're using every note in all these really interesting ways. You were the co-founder of a really cool startup called Percolate. And then now they're called Variance. And now you're running a Lefic, which is an AI strategy consultancy. And I'm just really excited to see how your mind has started to use these AI tools now that they're working so well. And I know you have some pretty cool clawed code stuff to show us. So yeah, thanks for coming on. Yeah, I'm super excited. That was a fun interview, all those years back. It was, it was really, really fun. So I want to just dive right into the thing that I think is so cool about what you're doing. So I know you have a whole vibe coding setup that you built for yourself. Can you talk us through that? Yeah, I wouldn't. I'm not sure about actually the vibe coding part of it. I have a sort of fairly heavy duty clawed code setup, but actually mostly not for code. So since those days of super organizers, like many people, I've abandoned ever note and switched over to Obsidian. And one of the big advantages with Obsidian as a note taking platform is that it's a bunch of markdown files and a bunch of folders. And they can then be synced with Git and you can do lots of other fun kinds of things. And so actually, probably my number one clawed code use is using it as a tool to interact with my notes. And so that I've got a fairly serious clawed code setup that I use with Obsidian. And my most recent obsession has been standing up a server in my house so that I could also use clawed code on my phone. This is incredible. I want to go through all of this. So where should we start? Should we do, should we do how you use clawed code as sort of this like research assistant notes organizer note takeer thing or should we start with how you use it on your phone? We can use it. We can start with just the sort of general part of it that that might be the sort of easiest. The phone is really just in extension of that same thing. I would say sort of generally, and this is something I feel like not enough people talk about with AI is like one of the things I find really extraordinary about it is the ability for me to work really productively on my phone. And that's been like a huge, huge change because so much of what I do is sort of writing or coding and the phone is definitely not the best place for that. And you know, even the phone wasn't always the best place for doing research and thinking. I felt like my computer was a better place for it, which is why I've been such a sort of note takeer. And you know, I have found whether it's like clawed code and obsidian or I mean, even clawed code and code, right? So like the other piece of it is being able to then, you know, if you see something go wrong, being able to sign in on your phone and have clawed code, push a small update to something because you just realize it while you're out is amazing. But then even like, you know, I use quite a bit of a GROC voice mode. And you know, I find that that as a sort of like alternative way of working through problems, I have a Tesla. So now it's baked into the Tesla. And you know, it's just, and you know, obviously all this sort of other tragedy BT and clawed in all these things of just being able to sort of like go and do research and really think and explore things in this device that's always been useful, but like not useful for deep work, I think is probably something most people would agree with is that the phone is not been the best place to kind of do deep coding and research work. And I feel like it, it, it's really changed my ability to do that. Wait, I got to stop you. So you're using GROC voice mode. And is that specifically because it's built into your Tesla or using it in situations where you could also use, for example, Chad GBT voice mode? No, I'm using it because it's way better than any of the other voice modes and I will find anybody who says anything different. Okay, no, tell me like what is, what do you like about? Why is it better? I, to be fair, open AI launch their real-time API, which may or may not be baked into Chad GBT voice. Now I, it's not totally clear, but the old voice mode was based on 4.0 and I just found it to be completely unusable. And a Gemini's voice mode, I just didn't find to be smart enough. And I just found GROC's voice mode to be significantly smarter than anybody else is. You know, I'm using GROC 2, 3, 4, I don't know, remote mode, or whatever the latest one. Yeah. Yeah, but not the super, I don't have the most expensive camera. Super heavy year, whatever. I don't have super heavy. But I just find it to be much better. It does tool calling way better than any of the other ones. That's, that's I found to be a major weakness of the voice models is that they don't do great tool calling and research and GROC seems to have solved that. So no, even before it was loaded in my Tesla, I dropped my daughter off at summer camp this summer up in New Hampshire. So I had a five-hour drive on my own. And I spent like two hours researching and essentially like working through a piece. And I did it by just like connecting it to Bluetooth and just sort of sitting there in the car. I found it to be by far the the best of the voice modes. I hope these other models catch up there because I would I would love more really good voice modes. I mean, I had a mind blowing session this weekend and I'm giving a talk and I'm sort of have some ideas. I think it's generally going to be about Transformers eating the world. And so I was sort of catching myself up on self-attention and exactly how it works. And I did like an hour session and it really I it like was by far the sort of best. Explanation I've ever read for it or ever heard I guess. And so yeah, I've just found it to be a kind of pretty extraordinary product. I do love voice mode for that. It's sort of like it's the it's a podcast made to visit with for you about whatever you're curious about. And that's really cool. I went up to I drove up state this weekend and I've been reading I've been reading the Iliad. And so I had it on audiobook and then I had some questions as I was driving. And so I unfortunately use chat GBT voice mode because I didn't know about GROC. So I wish that GROX voice once I wish that we had had this conversation before then. But the thing about chat GBT voice mode is yeah, I think when I first came out it was cool, but it just hasn't gotten as smart as the models are are. And they they gave it this new personality that I had to get used to where every time you ask it a question, it goes like, oh yeah, well, you know, and it's like it's just this like weird Gen Z thing that it feels like it's has a little bit too much on we or something like doesn't actually care about you. I don't know what that is. So I had to get you through that. GROC has a stoner mode for what it's worth. I will say the car version is very interesting to me. Like this was in the most recent Tesla release like a couple weeks ago. And you know, I had been doing that same thing you did where you just plug your phone in and you put it on Bluetooth and you, you know, do your best to make it work. And it's very interesting to just like have a voice AI button and it syncs back to your regular GROC, but it you can't get you can't rejoin old chats. So it's just like, hey, I it's just like, but you know, I mean, these things are significantly better than Siri and all of these other things. And particularly, I mean, you know, there's no comparison if you actually have something more than just a single question, you know, how I want an answer to it, right? Like if you actually want to have a conversation about the Iliad or, you know, about transformers and self attention like, um, I don't know, it's pretty amazing to just be able to sort of like hit this button and yeah, use that car time. I mean, I was on my way somewhere last week and I was, um, you know, I was like having it research, I was going back to the Walter Benjamin and I was, I was, I have this sort of idea to write a piece about how, um, the reactions to every new technology or essentially a leotist critique of it. And that, you know, it's always like, oh no, everybody's gonna be able to like do this thing that only we used to be able to do. And so I was in the car and I was thinking about this. And so I had to go and I was like, okay, you know, I know it's been yours since I read the Walter Benjamin. - Mass production of images. - One, yeah. - Yeah, that one. And so yeah, then I'm having conversations about that. And I'm like, who were Walter Benjamin's contemporaries? And then I'm like, in to all the, you know, it's just like, I don't know that's what, that's amazing. - It's the best. - It's the best, yeah, I don't know. (laughing) - Okay, and so you're filling your brain with all these things from Voice Mode, which I love. But tell us about your second brain center. Or I don't know how you refer to it. Whether you think that second brain is appropriate for this, but I wanna know how you're using Cloud Code to take notes and do research and all that kind of stuff. - Yeah, so you know, I could just open it up. Maybe that's the easiest thing. - That would be great. - Walk you through it. I'll start on my computer and then we can do the phone. The computer's just a way easier share here. So all right. So this is what I was working on before. But essentially, you know, this is just Cloud Code and it's just sitting on top of my obsidian. So, you know, if I jump out here and I just do, like, you know, you can see I'm following the paramethod and, you know, I've just got everything sort of organized in here and put in the places that they need to be. - Let me just stop you for people who are listening. So, okay, so we're looking at, we're looking at Cloud Code. It sounds, it seems like you have Cloud Code running in your obsidian vault. And there's some kind of, it's adding something to an exist. It looks like it's adding something to an existing note. Is that what's going on? That's what we're looking at. - Yeah, so in this particular one, I'm working on this talk. So, I'm putting on my conference in two weeks. I'm giving this talk about marketing and AI and sort of what's going on. And I'm, if we sort of jump back a second, I've been doing these conferences called brand BRXND.AI and they're about marketing and AI. And I did one in February in LA. And my talk in LA was about this, I'm sure you've seen it. It was the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the CIA, wrote this manual called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. And it was essentially a manual to help citizen saboters in Nazi-occupied territories, sort of like quietly sabotage the Nazi occupation. And so it was like, there's a whole bunch of stuff for blue collar workers that's like, if you're a janitor, you should leave a bucket of oily waste around and accidentally drop a cigarette in there so that it will, but then there's this amazing set of recommendations for white collar workers. And they're like, always refer things to committee, always revisit previously made decisions, make sure that like if somebody is trying to make a decision, you should suggest that they don't act with too much haste, less like we be embarrassed. And so it's like, you know, my talk was about kind of how one hope I have is that AI can kind of like sidestep a lot of the bureaucracy that exists inside large organizations because it sort of has this kind of goo-like effect where it can kind of fit into any crevice or crack because it can act as this fuzzy interface and it doesn't really care about the sort of input output. And so the sort of next part of the story is, after the conference, I realized that manual was in the public domain. So I hired a designer and I printed 300 copies and I wrote a new forward for it. And so we're giving this away at the conference. And so my talk is sort of trying to tie all these ideas together, right? So I'm trying to pull from the sabotage manual and then I was doing a bunch of research into wild Bill Donovan who started the OSS and the OSS was sort of the precursor to both the CIA and the special forces. And so anyway, I'm writing this talk. And so I've got a project inside my obsidian, which is the beginning of the research for this project. And I'm pulling in sort of like chats and articles and all these things. And then I'm constantly kind of talking to the AI in here and giving it new ideas. So I'm like, oh, I need some conclusions. Here's sort of my first thought on conclusions. And I'm having it like note down the conclusions. And then at the end of each day, I have the AI right up the changes that I sort of like the things I learned that day that are going to help me push this talk along. And so that's what you're looking at right here is sort of this is all part of this work that I've been doing where I've been feeding it. I was working on sort of what are some of the conclusions I want it to be. And so this is all sitting in this. This is all sitting in my obsidian inside of projects specifically for that talk. OK, so let me get a clearer sense of this. This is really interesting. So you have a project when you have a new thing, you're going to be a talk. You make a new folder. And then as you're thinking about stuff, you're working with Cloud Code inside of the folder. And you're researching stuff and then saying, I want you to take notes on it. In this particular case, you know that a component of your talk is the conclusions section. And so there is one particular markdown file that you're just going back and forth with it and having it add conclusions. But what else is in that folder? So is it like there's a body note and then there's an intro note? Or is it like-- So one of the big things here is that I'm in thinking mode, not writing mode yet. And so there's some stuff in here where I've specifically told-- I think it's in the front matter, actually, where I've told Cloud Code, like don't help me write anything right now. And I generally find this to be a big thing with all these bottles is like they immediately jump to wanting to help you with the artifact. And when you're just in thinking mode, you have to be very explicit in like, hey, I just want you to help me think and ask me questions. And so yeah, what you can see here is there's a bunch of files in here. I've got chats. So it's where I'm literally like taking chats and having another things. And I'm just like using the Obsidian web clipper to pull the whole chat in. I've got daily progress. That's where I'm having the AI actually look through all the notes that came out that day and like help me think through the progress. And then I've got research. That's where I've got a bunch of like articles and PDFs and stuff that I've pulled in so far and been reading about. And then there's a bunch of other kind of random notes along here where I've been just using it to kind of help me think. And so yeah, I was in the midst of one, I've got this conclusion note. So I sort of felt like I had blocked out the big themes of the talk. But I was like, OK, I need to figure out what am I going to say at the end. And essentially what I'm going to say at the end is about a lot of the stuff I've learned over the last few years of working with these large brands on AI projects. And so I was starting to get it to the conclusions. And so yeah, I'm just kind of like trying-- I'm really piecing all this stuff together right now. That's kind of what's happening. And give me a sense of when this folder was empty. What did you start with? So I think I started with-- I started with telling it like, I'm in thinking mode. I'm not in writing mode. Here are my past few talks that I've given a brand to give you a sense of the sort of style that I have. And here's the kind of general idea and the big points I want to make, right? I'm giving away this book. So I want to talk about simple sabotage field manual. And I have this notion. It's kind of just a title. It's like Transformers are eating the world. The idea that one of the very interesting things happening with these models is they're sort of displacing a whole bunch of specialized code in places. And so I sort of want to talk about that. And then I've got these conclusions. And so the first thing I said was like, hey, just go look through all of the rest of my probably 1,500 things in my obsidian. And go see anything else you can find that might be of value to this talk of the existing things I have. And so just go kind of pull those in to the research folder at the beginning to kind of like jumpstart this process. Got it. And you're starting-- are you starting to cloud in this folder? Are you starting it in your full obsidian vault so that it can access all that stuff? No, so I'm starting it in the full obsidian vault. So like if we-- like this is coming, if I step out of here, right? We're in the root directory. All this stuff is in the root directory in my obsidian. I see. And my obsidian setup is also like a little more intense for what it's worth because like I've also realized like you can add a package.json to add a bunch of like custom code commands to your obsidian that you can then run. And then you could use those code commands and slash commands and all of these other things. So there are a bunch of other kind of moving pieces in here. But generally, it's a fairly straightforward-- Got it. It's a-- I'm trying to use Para and some other kind of bits and pieces. So for people who are listening or watching in our-- we just went through a bunch of stuff really fast. So the basic gist is obsidian's just like a no-taker, no-taking app that runs-- it's all local. And so everything that all the notes you take, like they exist in essentially text files on your computer organized by folder. And when you're starting Cloud Code, one way to do it would be to start Cloud Code in the folder for the particular project that you have. But it sounds like what you're doing is instead, you're starting in the root directory where all of you-- your Obsidian notes live. And the advantage of that is, Cloud Code has some like sandboxing things where it's like, it's not really supposed to, like run commands outside of the folder it was started in. It can run commands inside of any subfolder, but it sounds like what you're doing. So it has access to your entire Obsidian. You can do a bunch of stuff. And you've also added a package.json, which lets it run custom software commands basically. That's really, really interesting. Okay. And do you find, 'cause I've sort of had this as a twinkle in my eye to have it go find relevant stuff for me, do you find that it's actually relevant and interesting? 'Cause I think sometimes when I've done this kind of thing before with language models, there are like, oh yeah, this random thing is relevant because XYZ, it doesn't feel, like I can understand why it picked it as being relevant, but if it really knew who I am and what I think is interesting, it definitely would not have. Do you find that that's the case or have you forgot our way to make it relevant? - I think by and large, yes, I agree with you. I think in this case, relevance is a little simpler since ultimately this talk is sort of, the things I was asking to look for, I've done a bunch of thinking and research around. So it's like I'm not asking it to make large conceptual leaps to relevance. It's like go find all this, like I wanna talk about the simple sabotage field manual. It can literally just do a like find for all the times, all the articles and things I've got in my obsidian about that. And so relevance is, yeah, it's kind of a loaded term, right? And I agree with what you're saying. I think this is what I'm asking to do is much more simple, which is like amongst this set of things, go find all the notes that I've already researched that kind of brought me to be thinking about these things to begin with. Got it. And then once you had to do all that research, did you have it do any sort of summary to let, you'd like sort of stimulate you to be like, okay, here are some jumping off points based on what you've done before. What was your next step once you, what did it get to? - No, so my next step is I actually have an agent in here. So if we go to continue for now. - And so for people who are listening, so you're just starting a cloud, you're using the continue flag. So you're starting cloud by continuing the last session that you're in. And now you've got, and you, cloud code gives us the ability to do sub agents. So there's like little mini-clods that you can spawn. And you have a, you have a, - I have a thinking partner one. - When thinking partner sub agent, okay, how does that work? - Yeah, and so this is the whole thing where I'm like, hey, you're a collaborative thinking partner specializing in helping people explore complex problems. You're always to facilitate thinking and basically don't try to write the thing. And so after I had that initial set of things, I flipped to this and it's like, okay, let's get into a flow, ask me the kinds of questions, help me think through it. This is also where I've got a chats folder in here. So it's like, it's not just happening here. I was also having like a, I've got a whole, sorry, I'm just backing out. So like if we go into, if we go into chats, like these are a whole bunch of the chats that I had. - Like what the interviewer? - No, these are chats I was having with chat, GPD and Clawed and GROC and all of these different things that I went and just grabbed the full transcript of. So I was also having all these other conversations and then I'm specifically telling the interviewer, like review all these other things. So actually, I think the first one, there's one of these conversations is I originally had this idea about transformers or eating the world and the sort of notion there is like, there was some research that came out, I think a few months ago that they had found, they were able to sort of outperform some specialized time series modeling models with transformers. And like, I think there's really interesting stuff. There's a story about Tesla we're moving three and a half thousand lines of code with a neural network. And I've just kind of got these bits and pieces and one of the ways I work generally is like when I have an idea of something to write or think about, I'll start a thread in chat GBT or a cloud and I'll then save that somewhere. And then I'll just kind of keep coming back to it when I have more ideas. It's like, oh, here's another example of transformers doing something. And so one of these conversations is actually that thing from probably four or five months ago when that kind of idea initially came into my head maybe when I saw the research about time series modeling or something. - Really interesting. - Okay, okay, so let's keep going. So you got this on the agent. And I actually, I want to just actually want to pause on that real quick, which is, I think this is a very common complaint that they just dive in and it's a common pattern to make a thinking agent. And I think cloud code or cloud in general is probably the best one for this. So this is a thing that we faced with one of the apps that we've been keeping it called Spiral which is an agent to go straighter. And I think we found the same kind of thing when I was thinking about, okay, how does a good ghost writer work? They don't just like, you don't say, hey, I want you to write a blog post and they're just like, cool, I made it. Here it is, like a good ghost writer is gonna get to know you. And really, you're gonna work together to figure out what's in your head about it but also shape what's in your head. Like it's not just, oh, I can see it and like I'm, they need to get it out of you. Like you're actually making it together. And in order to do that, you have to have a really good, an inner, basically interview process to uncover things. And that sounds like you found that too. And I think that's really, really interesting and really important for people who are thinking about, how do I get the best out of AI? Actually, stop for a second and like, let it ask you to understand you first. - Yeah. - One of the things I say to a lot of people is just like, I think partially because we call it generative, there's entirely too much focus on its ability to write and not enough focus on its ability to read. (laughing) It's like, its ability to read is incredible, right? And I think arguably, sort of like much more useful on a day to day basis. Like we produce artifacts far less frequently than we just like think about things. And so yeah, I do this a lot. This is definitely a complaint I have about all the models is like, you know, even when you very specifically tell it, not to try to do your work, it's still often still tries to do your work. It's like you have to like really, really be like, no, I said no. Like I think actually if we look at, so here, critical. When Noah says he's just collecting source materials or I do not under any circumstances want you to try to write it. Take this literally. Do not create outlides, drafts or any versions of docs that's writing only gather and organize the requested materials. - So good. I love it. - Yeah, this is like, but yeah, I think, you know, I think we all experience that. And, you know, I mean, I do hope over time that that sort of gets baked into the models. I think it's a very interesting tension that exists with the model companies 'cause like obviously, you know, like the sort of a lot of the economic output is sort of measured in the artifacts that it produces. And so I think it's very oriented. And, you know, I suspect that part of it is just like that sort of the helpful assistant thing has like come to be a sort of meme that is probably self-injusted. But yeah, it's, I think for those of us who are trying to do more interesting things with these models, it becomes a real barrier to work. - Totally. Okay, so I wanna think about, when you're using the thinking agent, did you say it like, is it outputting some sort of summary of what you've come to into a particular place or? - Yeah, so that thinking agent is sort of told to, as it asks me questions, kind of make notes about the questions that it's asking me and keep a kind of running log of what I'm uncovering and how I'm thinking about it and all those sorts of things. - Got it. And then, you know, you come back the next day and you're like, oh, I just wanna go down this rabbit hole on XYZ thing about the, you know, this wild bill guy. And that you start in a new chat, maybe with it, maybe with the subject, maybe not. And that becomes its own new file on that topic. - Yeah, exactly. So like, I, the wild bill stuff started as like, deep research in chat, GPT. And I, you know, had it go out. And I'm reading the wild bill book right now. There's a, like, one sort of particularly famous biography of him. And, you know, I'm kind of thinking about the bits and pieces and trying to make, and I think I made a kind of interesting connection in there where, you know, a big part of what sort of, he seems to have been after with the OSS and, you know, the sort of inspiration for the special forces was like, empowering individuals. You know, that sort of like the theme of that manual was like, obviously, empowering citizen saboteurs, but also, you know, I think a big part of the special forces is like, you know, having kind of like, incredible operators at the edge who, you know, obviously operate within a sort of command and control hierarchy, but like, have a ton of autonomy to move and execute independently because they're kind of, they have all the things that they need. And so, you know, in all of that wild bill research, I kind of went back to this and I was like, is this like an interesting way to connect all these ideas that like, maybe kind of there's a, you know, and again, this is still early. I have not like solidified these conclusions. This is like, you know, the regular kind of writing process, right? But it's like, well, I think there's this idea that like, you know, fundamentally, well, I know, you know, fundamentally one of the big things with transformers is it moved us from sequential based models to models that connect in, you know, sort of paralyzed their work better and that obviously a lot of us have much more powerful and, you know, interesting models and has, you know, arguably kicked off this entire sort of revolution of what's going on and, you know, what we both do for a living. And so, you know, I think there's this kind of interesting connection. And so that was what I was playing with, I think here was like, oh, maybe there's this connection between kind of sequential processing to this kind of parallel and then there's this connection to bureaucracy and then there's this connection wild bill who seems to be have been very much about sort of like working within a system but like having autonomy at the edges. So that's kind of what I was playing with and just kind of taking notes and then yeah, I would jump out and be like, oh, well, actually I haven't figured out a conclusion yet let me start the conclusion section and I'll just sort of get that going on the side. And then, you know, I have a job so I can't be doing this all the time. So it's also like you interrupt yourself and it's really nice to be able to come back and be like, you know, can you catch me up on the last three days of research. I love that question. That's so cool. And so yeah, you can just kind of go in and be like, can you catch me up on the last few days of the research and it's just going to go read all the stuff right and again, it's like I think the point you made earlier about the, you know, go find relevant sources. I find a lot that the difference between the people are getting a lot of this right now is part of it is just like you have a good feel for where the edges of the capabilities of these models are and you sort of like encourage them to work within those capabilities like this is an incredibly easy, you know, it's like we know what it's going to do here right like I could write all these Unix commands is just going to go find a bunch of files in this directory and it's going to look at them by date and it's going to look at all the files created in that project over the last. And we know it's going to be able to do that and so it's saying, you know, the major breakthrough day was this idea bureaucracy as positional and coding, which is very much work in progress idea, but I kind of like it. So it's just like it's pretty amazing also to just be able to kind of revisit deep work like this right where you know you know you're going to break your flow. You know, and it's like it's often you know I find whether it's code or writing the hardest part is like just picking it up again because you're you're out of it. So just to kind of like kickstart that process is sort of amazing I think what I was playing with here is this idea that bureaucracy was actually like an innovation right that like we look at bureaucracy as a negative and generally we talk about as a negative and I think often is a negative but you know. So that's what I think that's what I think is really good is that bureaucracy was a sort of like huge innovation for how companies operate right and ultimately it sort of represents kind of hierarchy and structure and all bunch of things that are like actually like pretty positive for operating at a large scale. You know again my kind of whole thesis on AI around all this bureaucracy stuff is that what's interesting about it is that as opposed to kind of past technologies which kind of forced you to make a decision about whether you wanted to kind of like. Use your existing sort of structure and build that technology into your existing structure or adopt the new structure most of the time the new software required you adopted the new structure and that's why so many sort of software projects failed for so long. At least that sort of part of what I think and you know I think part of what's interesting about AI what I find so interesting is like that. You can kind of keep letting everybody work in whatever way they want you know it's like a classic problem inside large companies is like one team wants to use a sauna and one wants to use Jure and one wants to use linear right and so then at some point there's like a there's a huge project and they bring in some big consulting firm and they decide they're going to all centralize on this one thing. And now two thirds of the company is unhappy and like they've all made sacrifices and you know you're sort of in this like very non ideal state and I think was really interesting about AI and I this is a little more sort of theoretical because I think you know we're so early in this is that like. I think it's very possible you could just say well everybody just keep doing what you're doing we're going to stick sort of some models in the middle they don't care what you use because like it's all just data structures to them and so we can then have this sort of central thing and if you know I when you we talked about percolate at the beginning percolate was a kind of marketing platform worked with very large company so is the enterprise software product is like. You know at the end of the day this is sort of the fundamental challenge of enterprise software is about like you know adoption and change management I just think. I think and I hope and again this is sort of the the optimist in me that like AI kind of lets us just not worry so much about these things and rather than trying to make everybody change the ways that they work kind of let them work in these ways and let AI sort of it's my I call it my Thomas is English muffin theory of AI which is that it like gets into the no. And so yeah that's so anyway but I have no idea what bureaucracy is positional and coding means yet I'm hoping I figured out the next two weeks before I have to give this talk I think no but I think the point is is totally right and it's actually not it doesn't have to be theoretical like I've been seeing this to inside of every and I've been meaning to write about it and the place that it's been coming up is we have so inside of every we run like six different products. And we have 15 people so it's it's like a crazy product to head count ratio and what's interesting is I really like doing things in a in a bottom up way so everyone each of the products is own stack we're not like centralized into a figure stack. Each you know GM that runs a product like just has made a decision about do I run rails or typescript or whatever and what I'm seeing happen which is very cool is a lot of the different products are running into similar things they want to solve for so an easy example is we have one product called sparkle which is a little bit like a finder replacement or spotlight replacement so it it organizes your files and then it implements really fast spotlight search. I'm a user I like it okay so then you know and so that's really cool and a gentick search coming soon check it out and we're just building a new product new GM new stack called para which is essentially an in house council so it's short for para legal not para like you know Tiago forte para and the whole job for para is just you know take all of your legal files and whenever I have a question and be like okay do we ever sign this contract or what's the employee agreement template or whatever it just gives you the answer and it's just a cloud code sitting on top of the directory. And and a thing that we need to implement for that is this sort of like fast file file search and what's really interesting is historically if we wanted to reuse the stuff that we learned from implementing sparkles file search that would have to be abstracted out into this modular library that anyone can use and then we have to be on the same platform and like they have all those things right. And what we did instead is we just added a pretty who's the developer for for para right now we just added her to the sparkle repo and I was just like just just ask cloud code to figure out how it works and just do your own version and so you get this like sort of tacit code sharing where we all get better but without having to do the work of abstracting and modularizing everything because the percentage of things that you can do that for are pretty low because it's a heavy lift. And I'm seeing that happen all the time we're just having a bunch of repos that are all solving some more problems but in different environments in different ways you everyone gets more productive because AI can kind of translate. I've one thing we've done there we also we so at a lefak we do a whole bunch of building for very large brands and so we sort of build all kinds of AI things and you know so we've got lots of sort of internal and external repos and we free only have the same thing and actually I've used the GitHub MCP a few times for that same purpose which is just like you know you're just in cursor or cloud code or whatever and you're like hey can you go like look up we run we've got an internal tool called intelligence that just sort of is a rapper around a whole bunch of like stuff that we use right so it's like got some CRM stuff and it's just like been a fun place to build the things that we need to run our company. But it's also a good place to kind of experiment and explore and figure out solutions to interesting problems and so I'll frequently be like oh can you go like just go look at the intelligence repo and you know look at how I implemented that thing there and take those sort of best practices and just pull them over and yeah I think that stuff again that's where I really do believe in this idea I like one of my whenever we have like a client meeting or something my first the question the icebreaker I was uses what was your aha moment with AI and mine was I mean it was probably not the very first but it's the one that sort of I think was most impactful was I was I got access to build a chat GPD plugin room and plugins can out like two and a half years ago or something now? - You mean 50 years ago? - 50 years ago. (laughing) And, you know, I like you. I've written a lot of software in my life and you know, you know, what you do when you like get access to something new, it's like I'm gonna go read the API docs and figure it out and, you know, like there's gonna be a contract and you know, as long as you follow that contract, it works. And I go read the plug-in spec and it basically is like, oh, you just stick a manifest.json file in the root directory of your application and in that, you describe how you want us to send you data and you describe how you're gonna send it back to us and then we'll deal with the rest. And I was just like, that's amazing. It's also like, it's how the world should work. Like I wish everything worked that way. I wish I didn't always have to adhere to the big companies contract for how to send and receive data. But also like, the thing that really struck me in that moment and it's like been my kind of like rallying cry around all this stuff is that, it's also just like fundamentally counterintuitive in that like I literally have a career's worth of intuition for how to integrate software systems and it flipped it out its head. Like like quite literally 180 degrees away from my intuition of how software systems should be integrated was this thing. And that I think since then has been my kind of thing for everybody has been like, this is just not intuitive for now and that's not a bad thing. It just means like you need to build intuition and like that's what we're all just out there trying to do with it, right? And so you know, when I don't know, I mean part of what I like about what you're doing and you know, even just hearing the things you're saying, but like generally what you do with the podcast and what you do with every is like, so much of it is like we're all kind of just figuring stuff out for the first time, right? And like, you know, we're like, oh, will this work? And then like all of a sudden you have this new bit of intuition for what these things can do and what a computer that is not deterministic looks like. And that's I think that's just what we're all doing all the time. And that's why so fun I think. That's why I love this moment 'cause like you just have a weird idea and you're like, has anyone done this before? And it's like no. And it's not a complicated idea. It's just a new, a whole new territory, you know? - Yes, I think about that all the time. And I think actually like, I think one of the really damaging sort of things out there is that I think there are a lot of people who think we're way further along in this than we are. And so, you know, I think particularly the people who are sort of scared, you know, we run, we work with like Fortune 50 companies. And so, you know, when we're sort of like out there and we're talking to people inside the organization, a lot of people feel like they've already been left behind. And it's like, no, you can like literally go sign into Chad Gbt and like, do something like nobody's thought about doing with this thing yet because there's just so much white space to explore. And you might discover some totally new way of using it and or like totally new trick. And I don't know, that's just, that's, and you know, I think to be fair to some people that's sort of very intimidating. And I don't think by and large, the models do any favors to themselves in helping those people get their feet wet. In that, like, you know, I think people go on there and they, you know, it's like you ask it to write you a poem and then it writes you a poem. You're like, okay, it wrote me a poem. But I don't know that feeling of like, that feeling of, yeah, it's like being on the frontier, right? Totally. And yeah, I think that your point about intuitions and getting intuitions is the big thing. And I think people, we don't realize is when you're dealing with something fundamentally new, you can't trust like how you reason about it without experiencing it because you have to build the intuition in order to be able to reason about what it means and how it fits in and whether it works or not. And we're just not used to that because we're used to reasoning about things we already have an intuition for. And I think that's why, like, when you first see, maybe when you first start chatting to you, be like, oh my god, it can do everything. Like, we're not gonna have jobs in a year. And now we're like three years in and we're like, yeah, it's awesome. And jobs are complicated. There's a lot of complex stuff that we do, you know? And I love kind of that, you know, in order to build the intuition, all you have to do is use it and that just by using it, you're already kind of on the edge for now. And yeah, I think that's the best. There's apparently, there's a German word called finger, spits and gifule. Of course there is. - Building fingertip feeling and that's been my, just because I can't resist also. I'm in that whole, in sort of the realm that you're discussing, like, I've been trying to do a lot of analogy, analogizing, right? It's sort of like, and I think, you know, that's really hard and, you know, but my two that have sort of stuck the most, one is just, I watch a lot of YouTube with my kids and we watch this channel called Veritasium. It's a science channel and-- - I love Veritasium. - Yeah, it's great. And he did one where he built a bike that locks out, left if you try to turn right and locks out right if you try to turn left. And what he's proving is that you can't actually turn a bike left, unless you can turn it right, which none of us would think about when we ride a bike, because it's all just second nature and intuition, but it's also why you can't explain to a child how to ride a bike. They just have to get on it and feel it. And so, you know, I really, that video is amazing and it's that channel is amazing. And but I thought a lot about that. Then the other one, which is a sort of deeper cut, is there's an amazing book about quantum physics called Beyond Weird by Philip Ball. And the thesis of the book is basically that, like, there's nothing particularly strange about quantum physics that we, like, we have very good understanding of it. Like, we wouldn't be talking right now, we wouldn't be on computers, we wouldn't have phones, if we didn't have, like, a very good grasp of the mechanics that exist underneath it. And his thesis in the book essentially is that, like, what's really lacking is the vocabulary, because, like, we all exist in a Newtonian world, not in a quantum one. And so, we all have words that reflect the sort of deterministic processes of that macro universe. And I think a lot about that, I have not, like, fully been able to sort of pull that string all the way to AI, but I feel like there's a real connection there, because I think that there's just something really weird about using probabilistic computers. Like, we're not used to using things that, like, you ask them the same question twice, and they have different answers. Like, that's very strange. We're not used to writing code where you can tell the larger company how you want them to send you data, and they can just do it. Like, these are not normal things that any of us have lived with in our lifetimes. And so, of course, it takes some time for us to adjust. I think so too. And I actually have a hope that language models by becoming a standard way that we use computers will create that vocabulary, because we actually are quite good at dealing with probabilistic, non-deterministic things like other humans. We've just grown up in a world where, because of the enlightenment and the scientific revolution, and the tools that came out of that are very much deterministic, we've associated that with how we see the world, because of those tools in that language. And there's a whole other part of the way that we see the world, which is much more squishy and much more like vibes-based, that has been, I think, deeper, oratized, especially in Western culture, that now that we have a tool that works that way, I think we'll be able to start seeing that again. And that's one of the beautiful things to me about language models is it opens up that whole world again. Yes. I love it. I do want to go back to Cloud Code. And we should do the phone unless there are other things that you want to share on the computer. But the thing I want to do before we get there, that's just on my mind right now, is you said, you watch this as your kids, and I'm sort of curious, what are your kids think about this, and how are you dealing with it with your kids? Yeah. So I've got a seven and a 10-year-old. And obviously, I'm pretty deeply embedded in this stuff. And so I've exposed them quite a bit to it. So they will occasionally use the voice models, and they have a pretty good understanding. And we'll be in the car and just play games and ask questions with Gora can do those kinds of things. This weekend, actually, for the first time my 10-year-old, she was really eager to be every year my wife's and her sister and brother and mom and all the cousins that we all get together and we do Christmas together. And so it's too many presents to gift everybody. So we do a kind of like not secret secret Santa where everybody chooses one person. And my 10-year-old really wanted to be the one who got to be the chooser. And I encouraged her to vibe code in app to do it. And so I just gave her my phone and V0. And honestly, that was like so amazing to watch. Like not just because it was so cool to see her do that and build it. and she went through, she was having so much fun. She did 75 revs on V0. So she really got it going, polished and sanded up. She also started to get into really interesting kind of computer science ideas without knowing it. So in one of the things, the adults give presents to adults and the kids give presents to kids. But she wanted this to be a more generalized app. So she realized that like rather than having adults and kids, you need to call them groups. And like, you know, so she's like getting into data modeling and like all of this, I'm like, watch if this conversation had happened. And I just thought that was so awesome. And, you know, also just like a real pet beam of mine right now. And I've sort of gotten this argument with a bunch of people is like, there seems to be a big conversation that like there's a bubble in vibe coding and like because one company or another might have too high of evaluation. And my take on that is like, I just, I could not care less what the valuations of these companies are. I think like fundamentally if there's a tool that can allow a 10 year old to like build an app, there can't be a bubble. Like I just like can't see a possibility where that is that. So anyway, that's sort of one side of it. The other big one for me that I think a lot about is sort of media literacy and education stuff. So, you know, both at the sort of schools they go to. And then also I went to NYU and I've sort of been having more and more conversations with the dean of the school I went to there. And there's a lot of fear inside schools right now about AI and about cheating and there's a big thing. You know, so some parents in my town, they, you know, they wanted to have more of a conversation about it and, you know, I someone who, I've thought about this a lot, but I've also just like been, I've spent my entire life thinking about sort of technology and its effects on culture. And I think I'm like relatively grounded in these things. I've like, I've put in good hours of thinking. I know that for sure. And so, you know, my take on it is like one that sort of you can't hide technology that won't be hidden, right? So it's like, you know, putting our head in the sand is not the best solution. And then, you know, my bigger one though is like I was out a friend of mine asked me to come talk to a school two years ago about AI out in LA and afterwards I was talking to an English teacher there. And she was like, what do I do? Like, what do I do about all these kids, you know, using AI? And I was like, look, I don't really know what your job is because like, I mean, being an English teacher for 11th grader sounds really much harder than my job. But on a really fundamental level, like I don't actually think your job is to teach these kids to write because that's like a lifelong pursuit. I think your job is to convince them that it's worth learning to write. And so in that way, like I'm not sure that anything fundamentally changes because of AI. Like I think that, you know, and again, this is my very optimistic take. But like I am, I think that there are so many parts of the education system that AI really just exposes the sort of flaws in the way that we teach. Like, why are there so many tests on these kinds of things instead of encouraging, thinking, and learning, and coming to love to write and research and whatever. You know, it's like we're so focused on teaching kids the, you know, five paragraph essay, you know, while every adult who is a writer has long abandoned that. And because like it's all about sort of discovering that you like to write and you, you know, what your own style is and how to do it. And you know, it's like I'm sure it's like, you know, a big part of working with AI to write is like telling it is ignoring it because you're like, no, that's not me. I'm not into that. Like I like I, I'm totally comfortable saying really here. I know you don't think it's a good idea, but like I'm cool with it. And so, you know, I don't know. I've been sort of having a lot of these different thoughts. I'm actually pitching a class for the fall of 26 at NYU to kind of the idea for it is code is essay. And my sort of point of view is like this sort of opens up this new way to express yourself. And that, you know, like we have all these other ways that we celebrate to express ourselves, but code has been like long shut off from people because it's, but actually it's kind of amazing. And it lets you express yourself in all these different kinds of ways. And like, you know, this is what my 10 year old was doing this weekend. So anyway, those are all the bits and pieces as a parent. I think about the one other thing I will plug is media literacy. I think it's a big piece of it. A lot of people are afraid of these models and hallucinations. And there's a book by a guy named Tim Hartford who writes for the FT and he's an economist. And he has a book called the truth detective, which is an adaptation of the data detective. But it's written for kids. And it's the best media literacy book I've ever read for adults or for children. And I think, you know, a lot of what this AI conversation exposes is like how bad a job we do with helping and arming our kids and our adults to be sort of like truly media and technology literate. And, you know, like being really good at knowing what's real on social media turns out to be also really useful for like differentiated between hallucinations and non hallucinations in tragedy BD, right? Like this is a sort of, to me, a kind of very central skill that like we need to arm everybody with. And I am sort of way more interested in that with my kids than I am in worrying about them. She has a very long answer to your question. I don't know if it got out of what you were looking for. No, it's amazing. I love that's exactly what I'm looking for. And it's sort of what it strikes me, another way to frame what you're saying is, for example, rather than learning, having them memorize and be quizzed on the 50 what the 50 states are asking them to go find the 50 states which had to be able to tell when the AI is giving them the wrong answer because that's a lot more of the the medical that they're going to need anyway down the down the line. And again, I'm not a teacher. I'm sure there's lots of teachers who are like, this is that's crazy for a lot of probably good reasons. But there's something interesting there where it becomes the meta skills become more important than they used to be. And in order to do well at the meta school, you have to also be able to like to some degree do the underlying skill too. But we probably could be spending much more time in the meta school than we are now in the education system. Like isn't really set up to do that anyway. Yeah, and you know, even I think even simpler examples is like I went to a school called Gallatin at NYU and when you graduate you have to sort of, it's not quite a thesis defense, but you have to sort of spend three hours with four professors and or three professors and sort of explain kind of your line of reasoning around why you studied what you studied and you need to be prepared to kind of like weave into that defense. Any of 25 books that you put on your book list. And you know, I was talking to them and it's like amazing. That's like entirely AI proof, right? Like there's no cheating on that. Like you show up in that room and you're either prepared to speak to it or you're not. And whether you prepared with AI or not is, it doesn't mean anything. Like it's like, like, do you, can you, can you make up an argument in this room? And like not everything is going to be that easy to be sort of like cut off. But like, I don't know, there's something really beautiful about that idea, right? Because it's like, it's naturally cheating proof because like you're sitting there and it's a question of like, did you actually internalize these things? And I don't know, that's way more interesting to me than even like was your essay good or any of these other. It's like, did you, did you get it? Like, and so yeah, I don't know. I'm trying to do my best to kind of like take a balanced approach and try to at least sort of like tamp down some of, I live in a small town in Connecticut and you know, I think there's a lot of fear amongst parents. You know, it's like, it was mobile phones and then it was social media and now it's AI and it's like, another thing that's going to ruin our kids and I don't think that that is true. But I think there are things we can and should do to encourage it to not be true, like really get them really good at the things you're saying. Like, how do you tell? And again, it's like a hallucination is just a form of the same kind of misinformation that exists on television and on the internet and in social media and everywhere else. And you know, just sort of like encouraging people to kind of get in touch. There's a great part of the truth detective for the kids book. He calls it the brain guard and like one of the bits of advice he has is when you encounter some piece of information, if it makes you feel really good because you agree with it, then you should be even more skeptical of it and he calls it the brain guard. You know, it's explaining this like this for a nine year old. And just thought that was like such a beautiful way to put it, right? Like that's like what, that's what you learn to do when you get good at being on the internet. Is that you're like, wait, I should like be more skeptical of this because this is like in line with everything. I think let me just double check the way like I, you know, you get to learn that feeling in your gut and get to learn when to react to it. And so yeah, that's a lot of how I think about it. That's great. I'm interested. I'm going to get I'm going to get that book. I'm interested in reading it. You should. My plan is to read it to my kids every year from now on. Nice. I love this. Just refresh it. All right. Now for the moment we've all been waiting for it, show us how you use Cloud Code on your phone as a second brain notaker. Okay. So here we go. So I am going into an app called Termius. Termius is just a terminal. And what is allowing all this to happen behind the scenes is in my basement. I have a mini PC. And on that mini PC, I have a thing called tail scale running. Tail scale lets you set up these very simple VPNs. So I'm currently inside, like if I scroll down here, you see I'm on a VPN. That's my personal VPN. I'm not like on an outside VPN. So the only way to access this machine is through my VPN. Okay. And so then when I go in there, because I sync my obsidian with Git, so I put it, it's on GitHub, I'm in a private GitHub. I can then sync it back down to here. And so then I can just call up Cloud. And now I'm just in Cloud Code talking and thinking. And I can just be like, what's new in the last two days. I can access any of my agents. I can do anything. And again, this is in my obsidian, but I can use this anywhere. So I'll be on the fly. I've got other repos in here. I realized a link was broken on my conference site. And so I just opened the repo. I pulled it down. I asked Cloud Code to make the changes. And I was able to do it right here. So this has been like completely wild to me. Because again, this is very much in that like on Tuesday of this week, we had Monday off Tuesday. I dropped the kids off of the bus. And then I went and I sat and had breakfast. And I literally sat. On my phone and worked on this talk for like two hours. And I did it through here, right? Like on my phone, where I was like doing real thinking and research and pulling things in and pacing things in and doing all this kind of stuff. And you know, I'm able to do it all. And it just it doesn't seem like I could do that kind of thing without that. So yeah, there's been like a completely revolutionary change in my life. And actually one of the things I've been doing lately is like setting up. I've got all these friends now who I've set up like little partitions of this mini PC in my basement. So that they can also run Cloud Code on their phone because I like it so much. Does this make you be like, oh my god, I got to drop everything and just build a actual purpose built notes app that has Cloud Code is a backend for this? No, I mean, actually one of the things I think a lot is like, maybe I just like everything should just run in Linux all the time for me. Maybe this is like at least for the short term. This is the answer to all of what I just need to like not have anything anywhere else. No, I mean, I'm I will say I'm sort of pretty out of the SES game these days. So I don't often kind of think that I should drop everything and do anything. I find this to be a really amazing solution. And but no, I mean, I this but this is really this is really like change the way I work and I feel like I can just be anywhere and just be on my phone and you know, I mean, I was out like I needed a break. It was you know, 430. I went and sat outside for a while and then we had a project that needed to get delivered to a client and a small change needs to be made that like I was the best suited to make that change. And so I just like hopped on my phone. I pulled the repo down and I went into cloud code. It's like a tiny little change. You know, like the way I find myself using cloud code the most for code is that like mostly I'm having it do the work. I already know how to do. You know, I'm like, oh, I like I know exactly what was going on in that situation. Like I knew why we were having the issue we were having. And so it was like I could have gone back to my computer and opened up cursor and done it in cursor either by hand or with cursor. But it's like I just I was like I told cloud code exactly where to look. It was like and I first confirmed that the problem was what I thought the problem was and then I just had it push a solution and it pushed a PR and then I was done. Amazing. And I was still sitting outside by the pond. I love that. Yeah, I've definitely had that experience. I've never I've not done on my phone. I'm like I have my laptop out with me, you know, buy the pond or buy a lake or whatever, but you're inspiring me. I have a Macmending in the office that I've been meaning to set up. So I think this is going to be one of the other, by the way, one of my other I'll just take it out of here for once. I actually just to show you this. One of my other big a haz recently has been building cloud code helpers for doing basically like a setup work. So it's like I'm not I'm like been playing with Linux lately. I'm playing with this Omarchi, which is DHH's Linux distribution. And I'm not like super comfortable in here. And so I got this whole this is a cloud code project specifically to help me configure this box. And it's like so nice because I'm like, oh, how do you do this in Linux again or like what's the Neo vim command or like can you change this? Can you help me install this plugin for Neo bit or whatever it is? And so now I have one on my Mac too where it's like can you clean up all the homebrew things or like I switched from like which Python package manager I was using. And it was like that would have been super overwhelming for me. And I was like I want to switch from using pip to using UV. Can you like just make that happen and like just did all this stuff for me. And it knows all my preferred settings. And so I actually have a version of this where like now I've got it so tuned that if I want to launch a new box for doing something, it'll just have all my settings ready to go. And then I can log into cloud code and the cloud code can then set up anything else that didn't get set up in the initial process. That is amazing. That's wild. This is my happy place. I can see that. Are you do you have any like are there are there any big projects like this that you've been itching to do or itching to try out? No, not really. I mean, I've been having a ton of fun. My server stuff has been a ton of fun. I've been doing a lot of that. I'm like I said, I mean, this is kind of a joke and kind of not is like I'm super interested in like doing more because cloud code has become such a sort of integral part of my life. I'm very interested in the command line. I found myself installing more and more things into the command line and like doing more and more works. I've been using like Simon Wilson has a LLM command line tool and like doing more and more stuff sort of in that and then like also layering that back into cloud code. So it's like I did my newest cloud code little obsidian tool is it I have an attachments hold during obsidian where all the PDFs and images and stuff in any note go. But in every way they have terrible names, right? I mean, and so this goes through very similar to the sparkle and but just in that obsidian folder and it it renames them all and then it also puts them in like a metadata. It puts them in a table in the attachments folder and then it renames all the attachment links back. So just like cleans everything up. It just does it through Gemini Flash. And so it's like I don't know stuff like that's kind of amazing. So I don't I'm just like I'm having in time my life just building and tinkering and you know, I mean, this is just on the side and I get to do the same thing. I mean, we work with like Amazon and Metin PayPal and all these big companies and you know, we're just like building amazing stuff all the time. I love that. I love the energy. If people are interested in following you or working with you a lefic, where should they find you? Yeah. So a lefic is a lefic.com, a lephic.com and then I also run this thing called brand BRXND.AI to make it particularly confusing. That's a conference. We've got the conference coming up on September 18th in New York City. You should come if you're around. It'll be really fun. We're going to talk about marketing and AI and I also write a newsletter there at newsletter.brxnd.ai about sort of specifically at this intersection of AI and marketing. Those are kind of the best places to find me these days. Awesome. No, I'm always a pleasure. Pleasure is online. Thank you Dan. Oh my gosh, folks. You absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and AI. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard. But instead of gold, it's filled with pure unadulterated knowledge bombs about chat GPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat craving for more. It's not just a show. It's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor. Hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now without any further ado, let me just say Dan, I'm absolutely hopeful. I hope you're hopelessly in love with you.