Should Finance Pros Be Using Vibe Coding to Build Their Own Tools? with Brock & Natalia

Excel is great if you work in finance most people don't know how to use Excel and so we're like oh That's not gonna work either and then someone made the joke. What if we vibe code it? I was like oh Maybe I should try to vibe code it So I use those credits that I had been accumulating for months and I went home and I sat down and I started vibe coding and I didn't know what to expect, but I walked away three hours later with like a working Prototype, I'm like this is nuts, and I was like I'm not like there's no way this works And then the next day I did a couple UI things so like total time was probably about six hours of me just like and it was fun Like it was a learning opportunity for me. Welcome everyone to another episode of FPNA on lot This one's gonna be a live episode where you get to ask questions I'd love to start before we can start. We'll give it a minute to let people join But if you're out there and you can hear us just confirm you can hear us let us know where you're coming from and your name So go ahead and throw that in the chat and we'll get started here in a minute So we'll give it another a minute or two for people to join Before we get started and just everybody knows I'll introduce them in a minute But I have Brock and Natalia with me, so we'll just give you a moment to comment here I'm gonna give it just one more minute if you can hear us let us know I haven't seen a comment yet Which tells me we're probably dealing with the lag there. There they go. I see Wayne Wayne Phillips just joined us great anyone else out there can hear us let us know we're coming from with love to know And before we get started here with the actual interviews Why don't we go ahead and Let our guests introduce themselves will take a minute Well, hopefully a few more of you will join let us know where you're coming from so Brock Why don't we start with you if you want to take a minute and just introduce yourself. Thanks Paul excited to be here I'm looking forward to this my name is Brock buyer. I am the controller at jump. We are the Leading AI operating system for financial services professionals So we started out AI note-taking have evolved immensely we started out with just wealth management and it's grown immensely so we're working with Insurance professionals tax and accounting professionals. It's been super super fun So yeah, that's a little bit about me. I started vibe coding probably. I don't even know for the Six months ago. I never remember the timeline. It just keeps becoming a blur. I love it. It's been Super super fun time in my career. All right. Well, thank you Brock And tell you if you want to take a minute and introduce yourself. Yes, hi everyone So I'm Natalia Kudinova. I signed senior director at Abby spent most of my career in finance leadership roles in international technology companies, and I've led a lot of different departments within finance, accounting, reporting, operations, projects included Accelerating mountain clothes and printing EAP systems across multiple countries and also finance transformation and today my focus is Treasury tax transfer pricing and the different cross-functional projects and also process improvement and then the focus on process Improvement eventually leads me to automation and vibe coding. Awesome. Well, thank you for that introduction and want to thank Natalia for going out of her comfort zone She mentioned this is the first time she's done a podcast like this So I told her I would take it easier on her. I'd give all the hard questions to Brock I'm ready to roll. I also know she mentioned this isn't her English isn't their native language So I appreciate her putting herself out there. I love when people do that So we'll go ahead and get started, but again if you're out there, please let us know where you're coming from let us know any questions you have and Where I want to start is there's a question. I always like to ask so we're gonna get both your perspectives on this And I'm gonna get yours first as a controller as a controller from your perspective what those great F PNA look like for me great F PNA is collaborative So for me, it's really it's not a completely different department. It's not a completely different function in my eyes Like you are working hand in hand with the accounting team to like drive the business So for me every single successful F PNA leader that I've worked with they love the accounting team They love getting the numbers. They love doing it in a title of matter But it's also having open door communication So whenever we make changes we want to make sure that F PNA is in the loop and vice versa. So For me good communication, but it's also just collaborative. I like it collaborative good communication I know you know the best F PNA roles had a close relationship with the accounting and controller and Obviously very important. So Natalia from your perspective when you think of great F PNA what comes to mind anything you want to add Yeah, to me a great F PNA not only explains what has happened and why but also is about what is likely to happen And it helps business to I don't see problems early and also to add from Treasury perspective so they're important to connect PNA forecast with cash flow because we know that Revenue and profit on paper do not always cash in the bank So to me great F PNA is also gives a connection between PNA and cash I love that you mentioned the cash because I've definitely seen situations where cash is kind of forgotten by F PNA And I learned early in my career how important it was when we brought in all our filling back in house and in the first year We recognized 10 million to the PNA on a good portion of that was because we had never been paid So we'd recognize the revenue, but never got the cash right and that's just a recipe for disaster if you let that continue Correct. Yeah. So all right. We got someone joining from the little Apple Manhattan, Kansas. Love it You got lane out there. So keep letting us know we're going to be discussing vibe coding today. So that's the topic We're going to jump into that for a minute. I'd love for any of you to share how you would define it I'm going to give Brock a chance and I'll share some of my thoughts I think everybody looks at it a little different. We're hearing terms finance engineer vibe coding and we've even with Excel Microsoft coined the term vibe working for the idea of natural language prompting to work in excels or seeing a lot of new terms But you know Brock, I know you've been kind of on the leading edge of this you've done several webinars around it developed quite a bit of tools How would you define vibe coding? How do you think about it particularly for finance? Yeah, for me it's it's funny because vibe coding I'm like hot take. I don't love the term vibe coding I For me, it's just it's as simple as using simple easy communication to be able to create something big and it's that simple. It really is. So for me when I first started out I was just trying to figure out how to build a few tools here and there that looked in our branding and looked nice It's really just like you prompting and making small tweaks here and there to build something bigger than you thought was imaginable It's it's crazy. That's that's how it's been for me. Um, yeah, that's what I would say. All right, I like it when I think of it I'll give a little bit of my thoughts and the thought you can add anything if you want but the way I think of vibe coding it's a way of Creating a tool using you're using some kind of coding language whether it's HTML CSS whatever that you you may or may not fully understand So through prompting through conversations with AI, you're able to create something that is code and I mean the good and bad is A lot of things are created that we don't necessarily understand the language and that's cool that we can do it And there's some scary things I think that come with that and we'll talk a little bit about later But that's kind of how I think about I like your like when you shared Brock the tell you any thoughts from you when you think of vibe coding I know that currently there is a new term occurred like finance engineer or something like that So I think that it's my coding is not actually about turning everyone was like finance professionals turning into engineers It's about just having ability to create tools that help finance people to solve a lot of tasks that previously were Either left in spreadsheets or like manual workarounds or we were just waiting for a tea and developers to help us Like put those into into life and yeah Finance people know their processes and know their like issues better than anyone else and now this gap between Like the finance people and the tools that help resolve these problems is really Like it reduces it is reduced by by coding so yeah, I think that's that's what is what it is for finance Not all of us. I think it's super well said that is In my opinion exactly what it is because like when you just think about it at the core basis It's like you vibe coding is like you building software Or like some dashboard or some visualization whatever the output is And it's you're building it by using plain language To be able to have the assistant Write the code and then write the code for you so that you're not doing it line by line And then create some output of your desire and the thing that's very valuable about it is like you said Historically Professionals haven't been able to do this so like if I wanted a dashboard back in the day or some kind of Report or whatever it was that required more technical expertise It was much more challenging to do that where now It is so much easier because of the tools that are out there. Yeah, I think a lot of our tasks would just say in IT backlog for like years. I would agree with that. Now it's better, everyone's much better. It is definitely. Yeah, there's something to be said for not having to wait for the IT backlog. So how did you get started and tell you how, what's your journey? What's kind of thing you've got to do to say, hey, I need to try this. Yeah, you know, actually, I started quite gradually. So my first discovery was maybe for others as well. It was Cloud4XL, right? So I used it to automate part of our cash, daily cash, reporting process through Power Query. So the Cloud helped me to write streets for Power Query. We have numerous banks and accounts, and we have to transform all this information from various sources into a consistent format for our cash report. And so Power Query does that. So it was already a significant improvement. But then I thought that, okay, like, Power Query only works within Excel and it works on Python. So what if I have a script that could be kind of independent and could be used outside of Excel, but at the same time provide me with the same result. And that's how my bank statement processing script was born. The first version was really very simple. No user interface. It was just a Python file that I had to open and run it essentially. But still, it felt to me like a breakthrough, like a huge breakthrough. Because I have never considered myself as a person who can write a software engineer or a developer who can write some software. And now I build something that works that actually resolves quite significant process issue because it was all done manually. It took a lot of time. And then I remember that after a few days of a big excitement, I said, okay, can I make it better? Can I make it more like just a friendly maybe run from a web interface, have a date selector, have a process log and so on. And so that's how I actually started web coding because I asked Claude, like how can I go from this version to a better one. And yet it just helped me and said, okay, yes, we can have a web up as simple as that. And I said, okay, let's do that. And that's how it started. >> Love it. Thank you for sharing your journey. And I love that you shared just using it out with Power Query, right? M code is a form, it's a scripting language, kind of a form of code. And it's a great example for AI. You know, there's so many different places you start. I think sometimes people think vibe coding means you have to start with this whole big application. And I see Brachio nodding his head, no. And I think we're all in agreement that's probably not the right definition for it. I'd sometimes how I think, but I want to share a couple comments we've got. Just real quick, I like what Alberto said. You're aligned with what Natalia just shared. vibe coding does not necessarily mean that you are building an app or a website. It can be as simple as having AI write the queries for you, right? SQL, Power Query, are build automation solutions via Power Automate. And so I think that's a great point. I think, you know, there's a lot of different ways we can think of vibe coding, right? Another one said agreeing that we're not always the first in line to get those IT resources. We now have the power to do it ourselves. And I think we've had the power before we have more power. You know, before it required a lot of knowledge to do it in Excel to do it in Python. I still think having those knowledge is helpful and it's easier. But you can do stuff without the level you've needed before. And then, you know, Wayne shares and I won't read all of this. But right, citizen coding can be dangerous if it developed app breaks. We'll talk a little bit about before, you know, being embedded into a process. But then he also shares I trust cloud code more than my own coding, right? I mean, Excel files breaks. So there's back and there's a lot of different thoughts here. And we'll jump into more of that. But Brock, your story, why don't you give us that? Yeah, so I started out. I went to an event back in September of 2025 where we were, it was the real at ReCon in San Francisco. And we heard about this company called Lovable. And I was like, who is like one of their seat, like one of their founders was there. And I'm like, I don't even know what this is fast forward to today. Like, that was one of the coolest experiences ever. Because one of the founders of Lovable was there in the audience. But we got a subscription to Lovable. And later on, I just had accumulated credits because like I'd never used it. I'm in accounting. I'm in finance. Like I, I don't buy code. I don't, I don't have any need for this, right? But we were moving offices. And when we were moving offices, we were trying to find a way to create hotel management. So like the desk management tools. We started looking into it. It was 10 to 20,000 dollars for us to buy the software. We could use Excel, but as everyone here knows, Excel is great if you work in finance. Most people don't know how to use Excel. And so we're like, oh, that's not going to work either. And then someone made the joke, what if we vibe code it? I was like, oh, maybe I should try to vibe code it. So I used those credits that I had been accumulating for months. And I went home and I sat down and I started vibe coding. And I didn't know what to expect, but I walked away three hours later with like a working prototype. I'm like, this is nuts. And I was like, I'm not like, there's no way this works. And then the next day I did a couple of UI things. So like total time was probably about six hours of me just like, and it was fun. Like it was a learning opportunity for me. And I showed it to the team. And it is what we use today. It's a, we, we call it perch. And it's like our whenever anybody comes in from out of out of state, they, they use, they use it to book their, their desk for the day. And yeah, it, it's crazy. So that was my first experience. And it's just been so much more sunset. I appreciate the use case. I mean, a couple things. One is something that's internal. It's relatively low risk. You know, not, not complex. Something you could have done in Excel. So I think those, those are the places to start. When I hear people saying, and you don't hear this much, but you know, I'm going to vibe code this big, huge solution. And I'm, I always kind of cringe a little bit. I see you nodding your head. Like I've, you know, I've heard someone say, you know, vibe code in ERP. And I'm like, okay, good luck with that. You know, let go of how it goes. It's crazy. You and I've had this conversation before where you see people talk about Excel being obsolete because of the new tools coming out. And I just like, my eyes, I'm afraid they're going to get stuck in the back of my head from them rolling so hard. And it's the same thing with when people talk about these tools being vibe coded and people say, sass is dead. I, I strongly disagree with that. Because I, I understand the tools well enough to know that you would never vibe code in ERP. You would never vibe code high risk areas of sensitive data. So like I would never vibe code like a procurement tool. Like end to end. Well, not a procurement tool. I would vibe code a procurement intake tool. I would not vibe code like end to end procurement tool. I just would not. I would not vibe code in ERP. But I would vibe code dashboards and something that was visually pleasing for like a, a run down of like a flash report or something like that. There's so many different use cases and it's a balancing act. But anything that has highly sensitive data that you need to be 100% accurate, you're just not going to vibe code it. Period. FP&A guy here. I want to take a minute and share something I've been working on. I've spent several months adding new affiliate programs to my website, by wondering why affiliate programs. Well, I can't train you on everything. But I can show you and give you trusted resources with exclusive FP&A guy discounts in many cases on my website. I have several of the top FP&A AI people in the world. I have the top certificate programs. I also have other programs like Excel, Power BI. I'm bringing you some of the top people that train in the world. There's Nicholas Boucher with exclusive discounts, David 14. Madden Carl Sideman with the exclusive discount, the top programs, FPAC, FMI, and more. So go ahead and check it out on my website. Sign up. And if you have a question on what program is right for you, go ahead and message me. I'll get back to LinkedIn or you can email me. So go to the FP&A guy.com and check out my trusted list of resources for you to upskill yourself. I think it's a good point. And I'll share one thing and we'll get back to some of the questions I had here. But if anyone wants to enter comments, please do. So two examples I've seen that I'm excited about. Actually, kind of three. One, Microsoft has released what they call, I think it's called Rayfin that works within its Power BI fabric where you can develop your own apps to help with dashboarding and different things via live. coding. I think that's a great case. My co-host on future financial and hopper has developed his own tool that helps for applications you vibe coded to ensure it's secure. It's meeting all the security requirements like vibe coded inside of the tool and it makes sure all those are taken care of. Now, I'm not saying that means you should vibe code in ERP, but it addresses some of those issues. I've seen a few vendors, one that they've created a section where what they've done within their, you know, FPNA tools are now allowing you to vibe code your own app so you get their database and their security in there. I mean, there's still other things, but we're seeing more and more solutions that will allow you to do a little bit more in a safer environment. At the same time, there's a limit, and we'll talk about that. I think we've talked about a little bit. We'll go a little bit deeper on that, but I want to touch on token cost, because I hear people for a while, we all heard token maxing. If you heard that term, and some companies had dashboards of how you're responsible, can you be? I mean, how many tokens can you use? I didn't mean to use your responsible. Okay, I did. But, you know, it's kind of like the old days of how fast can we burn our cash and grow? Shouldn't it be how, how responsibly can we grow? So I'd love your experience, italics. I know you started using, when you and I chatted, you started with your own personal account, doing it on your own, and then you were given some credits at work, and so tell us that story of what happened with your token. It was quite a surprising story. So yeah, just to give a perspective, our company provides a $40 monthly allowance for a code enterprise, and I used it in one day as simple as that. So about $30 went to, like me, formatting a few Excel tables. And then another 10, I spent for 20 minutes of flight coding. Yeah, it was quite, quite an experience, and this was very different from using my personal plan, because personal class subscription costs about $28 per month. And I've really used it for months, and build a few tools, a few applications after my processing script. So yeah, the surprising part I think was that we were expected to adopt AI experiments, so freely within our company, but the whole budget for the month was used in one session, simply. And that essentially, limits, I think, the possibility to experiment and to find new cases for AI implementation and for automation, because now when I know that how fast these tokens are used, I will be very cautious to experiment, because I will now just think about, oh my god, this will take for my budget of what shall I do. And I will not be so, you know, open-minded, in terms of like, okay, I have what is to like in now, prototype, I can experiment, and so on. So, anyway, like the whole story is about that enterprise, the subscription was meant to, you know, increase, I think, AI adoption, whereas now, from my perspective, the personal subscription is more like suitable for these needs. Of course, I understand why we pay more for enterprise, but still like, the cost was quite big for a very small task. And I think that's interesting, and obviously, I mean, I do think, yeah, enterprise costs be higher when you're paying for it directly, versus consumer, and I think there's a lot of learning for all of us. So, you know, there's, how do you optimize it? What's the right model? I mean, I think there's so many things that go into token costs, enterprise versus personal. But what you're sharing is, I think, a challenge we're all going to see more of in the future is, and I think you'll broker, probably agree here. Right now, token costs are subsidized, right? You know, open AI and anthropic, it's about growth, and anyone can look at the rumors out there, you can look at the S ones that are coming, or whatever been published. None of them are anywhere close to profitable. They're losing billions, and billions of dollars annually, and they have huge cash outflows. So, what does that mean when they go public? Prices aren't going to get cheaper. Now, they may get better. Models that brings the cost down to run the model. But as far as what we're doing today, cost is only going to go up in the sense of what they're going to charge. I mean, they got to charge quite a bit more to be profitable. Any, your thoughts on that, Brock? How do you kind of, and it's just maximizing token usage, just in general, wherever you want to take it? Yeah, I think it's a very interesting thing, because one thing, like, I think the different companies have gotten much better with monitoring, and like the way that you can monitor token usage, and there are tools that are starting to come out that are very helpful to, to help you understand how much you're spending and who's spending what? Like, for example, Claude, once you're on the enterprise plan, Anthropic does a really good job of just saying, setting limits, so you can say, this is a usage limit, this is how much money they can spend, et cetera, et cetera. So, that is super helpful, because then you can actually safeguard and make sure that you're not just blowing out, spend left and right. But the challenge is, is how do you define what good ROI is, right? Because everything there is kind of, it just depends on the person, it depends on the output, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. If you're just using in token maxing, just a token max, that's not really good to ROI, but if it's saving you 10, 15, 20 hours a week, because of the tasks is performing, I'd say it's a pretty good use case. I will say, I agree with you, Paul, I am a little, I'm a little fearful of what's in the future? What is, what are costs going to be when those, those tokens are not subsidized? How much more money are we going to be spending? And if we're very reliant, what's going to be the outcome? I don't know. And I think Wayne just made a comment in the chat. Very good. I'll grow that up here. So, very, very good call out on this one. It absolutely matters the model that you're using. Fable is one that has been used right now, that is just token maxing extreme. Everyone is like, how am I using this? How is this happening? How have I used all my tokens in 20 minutes? It's because of the model that you're using. And so, I would definitely recommend, if you're trying to be smart about how you're using these tokens, one, I would set limits. I would always set thresholds. So, you're not just spending and spending and spending and spending. Two, I would try to find some form of solution for like, what's the actual ROI? And three, I would sit down and say, what task am I trying to perform? And is that task? Which model does it require? You will see a lot of success from now. I just wanted to say that with all those implications and all these questions that we need to keep in mind, it's again, it makes the AI adoption much more difficult. Because now we need to think, okay, what is the model? What is the task? We are much, we can't basically experiment so freely. We have to keep in mind that we have certain, you know, guard rails, we have certain, you know, rules. What we are, like allowed to, to try what we are allowed to build and so on. So, it's just much more complicated than it's initially. FP&A guy here, we'll get back to the show in a minute. This section is unscripted. When I started my business, I had two main goals. To be trusted and for my content to come across as authentic and helpful. I've heard from many of you that I've accomplished those. Today, I have three goals to be trusted, authentic, and have the best beard in finance. All right, enough with the jokes, enough with the fun. What I'm asking for is I'm asking for you to help me out. If you've enjoyed the show, if you've enjoyed an interview, if you found it helpful in your career, can you please leave a rating and review that helps more people find the show, helps me grow the show, helps me grow my business. So, I'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment and leave me a review. You can do it on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen, or you can go to my website, vfpnaguy.com, that's fpandaguy.com. Go ahead and go to wallowlove, go down to the bottom, and you can click to leave a testimonial. Thanks for doing that. Thanks for listening. It's a lot different than being handed a spreadsheet where there's no costs outside of the application. Say try whatever you want. Go experiment, power query, or the internet, go search and figure it out, or here's a book on Python. Go build whatever you want, because there is a cost behind this. Now, the reality is, in general, what they found is for most tasks, the cost, the token cost tends to be about 5% of the overall cost when you add the humans to review it in finance. somebody to study and took, you know, general process, more workflow than vibe coding. So a little bit of a different case, but it was really interesting to see some of those numbers. You know, you get into vibe coding, especially when you get into Excel. Anything you do in Excel, it's going to use more tokens. Because it's a spreadsheet, and it has to read it differently than something that's, you know, very much structured, because it's unstructured, and it has to go through often. If you have a big, huge model, and I think you'd be pricing this block, and you ask it to interpret it, do a 2030 sheet model, you're going to be blowing through tokens in a hurry, because there's just tons of pieces of information. Everything goes sell. It's cost and tokens. Every piece of information. So I agree with you, Natalia, I agree with you, you know, Brock, there's things you can do to set limits and all that, and then there's just a lot of learning. It's a trying to learn from others. How do you optimize? What models should I be using? How much freedom do I have? We're all kind of figuring it out together, I think. Oh, absolutely. I would say to one of the biggest things that I've noticed is the way that you prompt definitely impacts your outputs as well, and like you're token. Well, it obviously impacts your outputs, but it also impacts the amount of tokens that you use. And like, so if you're trying to use something in code work, or if you're trying to use something in code, I highly recommend not just going straight to the source and like trying to prompt directly in those things. I would start with chat and make a very good prompt and have a very, very good conversation before you actually take that and put it into code or code work. So like as an example, a way that I found a lot of success is with the output in mind, I'm like, I will sit down and I will talk to chat and say, these are the things that I want to do. Pressure test this, help me think through this. What am I missing? What can make this better? And then essentially it will go through the whole process, and then I sit back and I say, okay, now put that into a prompt that I can put into code, right? And then it will give you the exact prompt. Now, if you think about it, it's taking it and giving exactly what you need in the way that you've explained it, the way that you've pressure tested it. It's very, very good. As opposed to going right into code and going back forth, me like, I actually don't like that. No, tweak this. No, do this. Change this. It just burns tokens left and right. And like, is that going to be the thing that's like materially going to save you a lot? No, but like, it's just like these little tips and tricks that you do with time that make you better at it. Another thing that makes a big difference, and then I'll get back to the questions I found is found a, I had me ended up probably using more tokens, but I was much more efficient. Once I started, you create some skills. You create folders. You have a workflow around whatever you're doing. Like, I code a lot of my website. And at first, it was just, let's try it all in the chat. Why am I doing it? And then it's, okay, let's put this in some folders. All right, let's create some skill files and audit file and other things. And also, I'm finding I could get a lot further than I could before, with just a little bit of structure. And so it's just, it's all new. It's a lot of learning for everybody. It's a ton of learning. It's crazy. And I think one thing that I will say is like, you will hear people talk about these things all the time. But the way that you actually learn is just by rolling up your sleeves and trying to do it yourself, right? Like, the first time that I learned how to host on Versel and use super base and all these other things and code within code and then push it to get hub. Like, all these different things, like, it was just me being like, okay, I've got to figure this thing out. How do I do it? And like, it took me forever. But now, if I did it again, it would take me, I don't know, a fourth of the time, maybe significantly less than that. So and that's true of anything, whether we're automating with 100% AI with Excel, power query, who remembers the first time that I write a power query? You're like, what am I doing? You're where you actually had to write it, not just drag and drop, but you had to figure something out on your, it was like, oh, this is painful. But then once you've done it a couple of times, it just becomes easier that first complex formula you write, whatever it may be. So I think you make a, a great point. And, you know, there's, you can go as deep or as shallow as you want. But before we get into that, I want to talk about some pros and cons and some different thoughts. What, what do you think of when I say, what are the prime things to vibe code? And I think you hinted on this earlier, Natalia. You mentioned workflows, I think dashboards, but where, what are some of the top candidates where people should start? Somebody wants to try some vibe coding or maybe the areas you start. You even mentioned power query. Is it starting with having it write some code for a tool you already know? Or what would you recommend for somebody for starting, Natalia, your thoughts? Yeah, actually, I would select a process or, yeah, part of the process that takes a lot of time for processing data. So, for example, if you have something like you don't know the reports, you then have to, you know, clean the data, maybe apply VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, then do some pivot, merge you with something else, and then maybe do some visual, visual presentation out of this. So, this type of work, essentially notes analysis, but kind of preparation for analysis, this all can be automated with vibe coding. And that is exactly the types of work that I automated in my vibe coded application, finance control center that I've done for myself, for my daily work. Yeah, so I would start with some, like if you have a number of various processes, I would select something that requires a lot of data preparation because it's kind of work that vibe coding can automate very quickly and give you very clear visual form in the way you need. And if you don't like, you can change it very quickly and so on and so forth. So, and the beauty of it is that it uses Python, so it doesn't hallucinate and because logic is fixed. So, it will apply the same logic over and over if you need to update the file, if you need it like first month and you need the same thing in the second month or a week by week. So, it's a repetitive, you know, data processing, let's say this, that you do on regular basis. So, something like that, that's where I would start with. Thank you appreciate that. I want to get your thoughts on this Brock and then I'm going to share something Wayne shared in the comments, but go ahead and let you share your thoughts Brock. Yeah, I think Natalia's spot on, like for me, the way that I would encourage people to start is by looking at the tasks that you perform on a regular basis that are repeatable and are rules based. Sometimes they're tasks that you do not enjoy performing. So, for me, I did not like doing bank reconciliations every single month. Go figure it, that's not the most fun or glamorous thing in the world. If anyone's out there, raise your hand if you enjoy them, we'd love to know. Bless your heart if you are one that enjoys doing bank recon because I am not one of those people. But what's crazy is you sit down and you define the task, you define the scope, you write out the instructions and what you do is you essentially can then take that and have the task be automated. Now, the thing that I would say is like when it comes to judgment and it when it comes to like really thinking, I would still keep a human in the loop. And I think human in the loop is a very, very good term to use and it's the thing that you need to always be thinking about because even when you do these rules based tasks, it's important to have human in the loop so you can have the AI perform the recon but there's still going to be a need for a human to sit back and just not blindly accept the output that is performed. So a human needs to be in the loop to review and make sure that what has been created is still good and accurate because at the end of the day, AI can perform the task for you. That's great. But the buck stops with you if you if you give an output or if you give a financial report that AI helped generate but it's wrong like you can't just blame AI that it's on you, right? So those are just important things in that I would say. And I want to ask a question here and then be sure, Wayne shared, as I've listened to you talk, as we talk, how do you define building, building with AI like you're taking skills, you're automating workflows, but you're not necessarily coding, maybe you're doing some coding in that, but how do you think about the two? Because sometimes, right, the process isn't necessarily, there's a lot of intermingling. I think some people think vibe coding means you have to get an application. But anytime we want something deterministic, we need a formula or we need code, whether it's using an Excel formula, the power query, right? If you want something to repeat the same every single time, you need it to be deterministic because you're not going to get the exact same answer every single time if you just let AI do it. So how do you think about that? You know, is it, if I use a little bit of Python script and some kind of workflow, I built the agents and my vibe coding, I'm just kind of curious your thoughts, Brock, how do you, how do we think about this? Yeah, I think it's, it's a great question. There's a lot to think about an unpack, because when we hear the term vibe coding, it's kind of a black box. It's pretty ambiguous. And it makes it very challenging. And even when you hear the term AI, it's pretty ambiguous. And it's kind of a black box. For me, when I sit down and think about it, I try to clearly define and clearly understand the breakdown of how and when to use the different elements of AI. The LLM that I use mostly is quad. There's three components of the claw desktop when you're in a pro subscription. You have chat, you have co-work and you have code. Chat is like a conversation piece when you're going back and forth and you're just conversing back and forth. Co-work is like a multi-step task tool that can help pull files and it be able to upload things and organize your desktop, do whatever tasks you need performed. And then code is where you have like an output or you have some visualization that's created as a result, right? So you can use all three together, you can use one, you can use two, it doesn't matter really. The vibe coding element to me is like when you're using code, right? Code is more vibe coding in my opinion. But when you're using AI, it can be all three to be able to perform the various tasks and it really just depends on the task you're trying to perform on a monthly basis. And it depends on the tools that you have access to and what connectors are in place. So there's a lot to unpack with that, but yeah, happy to elaborate. Yeah, no, I think you touched on something that, you know, can be its own, pretty much its own episode. I'm sure Nikolai will be around. What are the different tools? How do we think about them? We're all, there's no perfect answer. I've seen some people define finance engineer as someone who's building systems, which frankly, I disagree that's the primary role. I think it's someone who's primarily fixing workflows and automating, you know, workflow type tasks versus building what I'll call true systems. But everybody has a different opinion and that's what is so fascinating is how fast this has moved. I remember when the internet came out and it was nowhere near this fast. Or I remember when I got my first computer in junior high and using some of the very early computers in elementary school and, you know, none of them were anywhere near this fast. So, you know, Nikolai, I'd like to get your thoughts. I think you talked a little bit about this, but what would you say people should not be doing with buying coding? What are maybe, where do you think the, you know, limits are kind of, how should they think about that? Are there situations where it's like, look, don't, AI doesn't make sense here as far as building in your thoughts? I'll attach that a bit earlier and I agree here. I agree here with Brock, actually, because I also think that we shouldn't wipe code things that are business critical, such as, for example, European, or even within, if we take a side of European, but something that touches cash, for example, or payroll tax. So, where the impact of error or impact of, you know, failure in this wipe code application is huge and material, essentially. So, that's that are the areas that I think we should not touch with wipe coding. Wipe coding for me is more about maybe personal productivity, plus maybe team productivity, but not business critical. So, yeah. I think that's a good way to think about it, team and personal versus business critical. I will share really interesting and I'll say Brock once I did anything. I chat with the guy yesterday. So, if anyone's interested and I'm just going to throw this up here real quick, you have to, Friday, Drive Train is actually doing a hack. You can find my post online about that and go to Drive Train AI, the FinHack, and Register, where you can submit anything you've I've coded. And I've been talking to a bunch of people where they've been sharing their ideas. And most of them have been, you know, ones in application to help with Dunning or different ideas. But one guy reshaped me yesterday and he's like, I've been doing it for nearly two years. He's applied for patents and he's built an entire solution. Like he actually has a patent of connecting AI to OLAP and relational databases and he has patents pending. And I was like, okay, that's the extreme case. Like he's built an entire software. He's now hired a developer to help him with the next phase of it. And he plans on releasing it commercially. Sure, he vibe coded, but I don't think any of us would say that's what we should be doing. And so it was really, it was interesting. I'm like, yeah, what he submits it because it was definitely something that was a ton of time. I'm like, okay, yeah, I wouldn't encourage anyone to try to do that in their job. Let's see Brock. Oh, no, no, I wouldn't either. Like you got to think about it like from this perspective, if it breaks, if you build it, and if it breaks, who's responsible for fixing it? It's usually the person who built it, right? Now think about your day-to-day process. Think about like, I'm an accountant. So like for me, let me speak from an accounting lens. If I was trying to build an ERP, think about the hundreds of thousands of one-off scenarios that might occur, right? What if a payment comes in and it hasn't, it has the wrong date on it? How is that going to be impacted within the ERP? What if I marked something as paid, but it shouldn't have been paid? It was the wrong invoice. Can I go back and fix that? What if I have a bank statement that like isn't reconciling correctly and all the feeds are messed up, and I need to remove some of the duplicates, some of them were duplicates, some of them were not? Like think of the hundreds of thousands of scenarios that I have to go through and personally say, in this scenario, we actually need you to do X, Y, and Z. There is no world where I'm saving time and money and just pay for the ERP for having sex. So like, I agree, if it is a very, very important business related software or tool like it's not worth it, it's just not. And at the end of the day, that's the most important thing, like to, you know, go ahead. I was going to say, and I mentioned if you want to, like, resign. Like, what is next? Who will be? Oh, yeah, trouble. But so, yeah. If not, of course, if you are not the business owner, but the resigned part. Now, if I asked how many of you, when you inherited a financial model in Excel, use what the prior person gave you or started over. I'm going to guess price 60% of the time you start over. As you're vibrating these tools, I think we're going to run into a lot of that. The next person is going to think differently than you. So, you know, you got to balance that. How critical is what you vibe coded to the process? How good are the instructions? We're going to run into maintenance issues. We're going to run into, I think, a lot of these tools will be similar to Excel, where when someone puts VBA in there, you don't understand it. Yes, you can now ask code to help you. So there are some benefits. But that's one of my biggest concerns with all this is how do we make sure it can be maintained for the long term and we're not creating a bunch of sprawl? Because I feel like that's a real risk. So I'll ask both of you on this. I'll start with you here, Brock, which loves some of your thoughts. I don't really know. Let me think about it for two seconds, because for me, there's so many things. Yeah, let me think about it for two seconds. No, you can have a minute to think about it. Yeah, if you stop here, that's all you can share if you think about that. Not every tool we need to maintain forever. So I think again, if you think about the wipecoded apps as the tools for personal productivity versus team productivity, then a personal productivity tool can be personal and it doesn't have to be like, transferred over. So any person can use the created zone for this work. But yeah, if we think about like team productivity tool like that is shared maybe within the team, then I think it's important that we have certain handover process. So we shouldn't maintain it alone or the person should not maintain it alone, which should maybe involve a team, we should host it in some infrastructure, in some companies cloud wherever. And maybe a team can help us then hand over it to the next person or the next team member. So that's why I think we will maybe have a certain kind of special tools that are just used by one person. And it's still can be okay. No, appreciate that, Brock. Have a little kind of people on it? Yeah, I think that spot on. I think it really depends on the organization as a whole and like what tasks you're trying to perform. Like from a security perspective, the best way for you to just be completely safe is like if it is something that is not locally hosted. So like when you create tools, you can be able to just have it locally hosted on your desktop, which is pretty safe, right? Like, but when you actually start to have things hosted, you should always be running that through the security teams, like no questions asked in my opinion. But when it comes to like just cross collaboration, there's so many ways to think about it. And like there's companies out there that are doing a very, very good job of like sharing these tools, like I know of a handful who have created these tools that make it so that it's easily able to just share tools, skills, other things that have been created, but it's done in a secure way. It's always done through the security team, another way of sharing like some of these skills and things that you built are, well, it's become easier to share skills specifically, but like when it comes to like outputs and like code and other things like that, usually you have like some form of a private GitHub repo that's only shared with your team that you can be able to upload those and that have your team download those. So I think it really just depends on the team, but like I would always, like if we're just talking about from security perspective, you should always involve your security team for sure. - I agree. So I think on the security side, you're always gonna need to involve like if it's something personal, 100% on your desktop, okay. But soon as others involved internet connections to any tool that goes outside your company, so any third party tool, there should be that, just kind of check. Now if they've already given approval, if it's standard MCPs, that's one thing. But beyond that, if you're building an API or you're connecting something that isn't standard, you're giving passwords that are, whatever those may be, always have that conversation. I think the second side is there's the long-term maintenance, which is something engineers are designed for. It's why you'll see a little bit more of this finance engineer role is when things break, there's gonna be some challenges. So it's gonna be interesting to watch. I would imagine a number of things we build ourselves won't get passed on like Excel spreadsheets. Is that good? Is that bad? Depends on who you ask, depends on what it is. Again, it comes back to document pool. The great thing is, and knowledge, it's always hard to maintain something when you don't understand it. But it's much easier when you can ask a tool that does, and that you could have a right documentation. Doesn't mean it's full proof, doesn't mean it's not good to break, those are things to consider. But that, I don't think that's enough to stop somebody from experimenting. I still think the right decision to do the experiment. I'm gonna take a couple questions, and I'm gonna ask both of you kind of your final thoughts, and we'll wrap up here as we're coming up on the top of the hour. So someone asked a little bit more about co-work. I saw a few comments there. So I'm just gonna share one thing. Someone said, it's desktop based for a yes. Co-work sits within the cloud application on your desktop. But co-work works in the cloud. It processes everything in the cloud. Code processes things on your machine. Hence why you do a plug-in when you build skills. So code has the ability since it's cloud to take control of your machine and work on it. But you access it through the desktop. So that's a little more color there, since there are a couple questions. I would encourage anyone that's trying to understand if it's the cloud library or you're trying, whichever one you're trying to understand, whether it's cloud, whether it's co-pilot, whether it's chat to UPT, they have a lot of great free training. Anthropic probably has 40 hours worth of training. Yes, you can go pay someone who wants specific finance, but if you're just trying to understand the basics of the tool, go check them out. It's a great place to start. And there's a lot of other sharing things. I know Brock's been sharing some things on LinkedIn and also TikTok if you have a newsletter now. So there's a lot of resources out there. So that's what I was gonna say on that one. Another great tip here that somebody shared, is that you're like, if you use AI for VBA code, make sure you create a skill and give it some examples of what good code looks like because the reality is a lot of the code on the internet is not good, so some samples and guard routes. Now, if you don't know VBA, that becomes tough. And that's where I, one of the things I say is AI is a magnifier in many ways. If you know what you're doing, it will magnify that. If you don't, it will magnify that eventually. Doesn't mean you can't get there, doesn't mean you can't figure it out, but it's why you still need to know accounting or modeling or Excel, because you'll be better with AI than if you didn't know it. All right, we'll do one more here. You can quickly find code in Excel add-in that can be shared with co-workers for your productivity macros, yeah, Cloud Code. Yes, you could do that. So you could even create your own add-ins within Excel. That's something that's a little more secured, example, Wayne shared. I haven't gone there at all. I don't know if either of you have tried that, but that's one he's done. That's an interesting one. I'll be honest, I hadn't even thought about it, but that's a good use case in the Microsoft's, if you're putting an add-in into Excel, you're going through Microsoft. They're going to make sure that's secure. So there's another interesting kind of case. There's all kind that will continue to see them. So why don't we go ahead and wrap up? If we get any more comments, I may take one more, but why don't we go to you Brock first, and then we'll go to you Natalia. Just any last thoughts around bytecoding you want to share. Yeah, I think you touched on this. I highly recommend, and I think that I'm going to go back and look more at some of these things. Anthropic really does have a lot of free courses just to teach you the fundamentals of AI just in general, right? Like clawed and understanding clawed, like the platform, understanding code work, understanding code, things like that, very, very, very helpful. But like just in general, the thing that I would say is, you don't have to feel this like pressure to vibe code every single tool. You shouldn't. Like, I think that's just silly to just think that, nor should you. Like at the end of the day, you're supposed to be doing your tasks and your job effectively in a good manner. And like, these tools absolutely help you, and they absolutely can be very crucial in making you more successful in your role. However, don't feel like this huge pressure to vibe code everything. Just take a case by case, and if it makes sense, try it. Like, be surprised and be impressed with what you're doing, right? And those are some of the things that I would think through. And don't be overwhelmed when things go south and when things aren't working. That's part of the learning process. I think that it's more important to fail and not figure out how to do it. And then finally find a way to make it work. I think those moments you learn more. So those are my parting words. - One of the keys to success at a camp I worked at, one of their principles was failure leads to success. Nothing wrong with failing. It's, are you going to continue to learn through the process? If not, well, then you're going to fall short. - Yep. - Natalia, we're going to give you last word here. - Yeah, good luck, everyone, with vibe code. - I'd be totally with Brock. You should not start with like thoughts, okay, I need to build an application. No, start with something simple and something that you know very well. Yeah, don't be afraid that the first version will not be for cool. My first tool was not beautiful at all, but it was enough to give me the excitement and to understand that it can work and it will work. And I can make it better. And I actually learned a lot through the way, through the process. And yeah, I just recommend everyone to start with the tasks that you are most tired of doing manually. That's the key. - So, good luck. - So I need to create an avatar to do my interviews. Not kidding. I love doing interviews, joking. All right, thank you, Natalia, thank you Brock. Loved what you shared. Thank you, everybody, for joining in the participation, Wayne, Kevin, there were others out there as well that participated. So thank you for Alberto's out there. Thank you for joining us. This will get released as an episode here in a few weeks probably beginning of August or September in the next month or so. But thank you for joining us and really appreciate it. You guys can reach out to Brock or Natalia. I'm Sean Lincoln. If you have any questions, and we happy to answer those. But thank you Brock and Natalia for taking the time. Appreciate it. - Absolutely. Thanks for having us. This has been awesome. - Yeah, that's was great. Thank you. - Thank you to the Hold On. - Yes, thank you so much. - Thank you, everybody. That's it for today's episode of F-P-N-A Unlock. If you enjoy F-P-N-A Unlocked, please take a moment to leave a five star rating and review. It's the best way to support the F-P-N-A guy and help more F-P-N-A professionals discover the show. Remember, you can earn CPE credit for this episode by visiting earmarkcpe.com, downloading the app and completing the quiz. If you need continuing education credits for the F-PAC certification, complete the quiz and reach out to me directly. I'm Paul Barnhurst, the F-P-N-A guy, and I'll see you next time. (upbeat music)