Vibe Coded. No Security. Dead in 72 Hours.

[00:00] Dave Pengelley: This week in the news, we talk about the VERCEL data breach, and what are the implications of that, given that more and more people are vibe coding these solutions and more people are using them. Who's considering the security needs? Who's thinking about how these lockdown and secure really interesting topics that we need to think about in this future of everyone building their own software? [00:19] Dave Pengelley: We also then close out today with a live demo of Claude Design, the new design tool that Claude's been hyping. Is it worth the hype? Well, we do a live demo. Where from scratch. We build out a marketing site and presentation deck for the AI Operators podcast. And so, uh, that's really interesting to see what it's capable of. [00:39] Dave Pengelley: And, uh, you can decide for yourself whether you think it's a tool worth your time. If you think AI operators is worth your time, please make sure you like, subscribe, hit the bell icon and as always, comment comments, help the algorithm. Tell people about this, that this is good content that they should know about. [00:54] Dave Pengelley: We appreciate your support and we'll, uh, hope you enjoy the show. [01:00] Dave Pengelley: All right. Welcome [01:00] Dave Pengelley: everyone. We are here, we are a few minutes late for our midday start. Hopefully everyone that gave them time to get their lunch, get at their desks and, and lock in for some great AI operators talk. How are we all this week? Have we, uh, I've got a headache, so let's see how we go. [01:15] Marno Brits: I'm doing great. [01:16] Marno Brits: It's been a awesome week so far. Um, I was just saying before, like shortly, shortly before joining the meeting, one of my automations, um, that the customer's using broke and I was like, oh, no, what, what's changed? Like normally OpenAI pushed something or someone made an update that just destroys something. [01:32] Marno Brits: Um, but it was fortunately just the customer changed the column name to be slightly different and the AI was looking specifically for that column name. So that was a quick little win from like, oh crap, how are we gonna fix this to, oh no, it's just a user error that's all. Just, [01:46] Dave Pengelley: just put, put the app in an ice bath. [01:48] Dave Pengelley: That'll fix it. Right? Mano that [01:49] Marno Brits: work. [01:50] Dave Pengelley: Want me your style? [01:51] Marno Brits: Actually missed the last night. I didn't go for the first time in like six months. No, I wanted to spend some time with the Mrs. So it was a quiet night at home, which was nice. [00:02:00] [02:00] Dave Pengelley: Very good. Ladies, uh, Matt, I should, I should welcome for an, an introduce like, Amber. [02:04] Dave Pengelley: You've been with us before, but Manjula, welcome to the show. You are, you are new here with us. [02:08] Manjula Kerai: Yeah. Really excited to be here. Thank you. [02:12] Dave Pengelley: How's, uh, how's everyone's week been? Amber, you're, you're, uh, you're pretty busy at the moment. Are you running shows and doing things? [02:17] Amber Hills: Yeah, it has been quite, quite wild. [02:21] Amber Hills: Um, but it's been, it's good. I'm, I'm enjoying it. I'm just going with the flow, riding the waves. Um, so I've had a bit of travel and speaking up north, so I've just come back from Cairns speaking at an event there, um, promoting AI Automation Australia, and yeah, it's been, it's. Like, it's fun, you know? It's any, [02:45] Dave Pengelley: any crocs or jellyfish up there? [02:46] Dave Pengelley: Did you enjoy the uh, the weather up in Cairnes? [02:49] Amber Hills: It was so beautiful. Like palm trees galore. Just didn't wanna leave. [02:54] Dave Pengelley: Nice. [02:55] Marno Brits: Damn. [02:56] Amber Hills: Mm. [02:57] Dave Pengelley: Yeah. Well, well, well, we're enjoying chill winter on setting [00:03:00] down here. Mm. Like you're, you're in Brisbane, right? So it's not super wintry there. It never really gets super wintry in Brisbane. [03:06] Amber Hills: No, but it's still cold. Like, I feel the cold like even in summer, so, but yeah. No, it's, it's, it's not too, too cold right at the moment. [03:17] Dave Pengelley: Hmm. How, how's it in kgo man? [03:20] Marno Brits: Uh, it's been ridiculously gold. I mean, cold past is like 20 degrees. Um, but no, it, it's very, very cold at the moment. I think it got up to, it got down to 12 degrees last night. [03:32] Marno Brits: Um, but that was about like nine 30. So we had, not a cycling, but we had like a bit of a dust storm come through two days ago. For some reason after like the hottest dust storm ever, like the wind was just like slapping you. Like, it's so like hot, humid air. And then shortly after that it's just cold. Like even the air cos turned off because it's too cold now. [03:54] Marno Brits: Yeah. [03:54] Dave Pengelley: And Manjula, if I, if I step out the back door and yell loud enough, you can probably hear me. We, we, [00:04:00] um, [04:00] Manjula Kerai: yeah. [04:01] Dave Pengelley: It's cooling down in Western Sydney, isn't it? [04:03] Manjula Kerai: It's, yeah, it is in the mornings. I wish if I have to drive, um, you know, I wish I'd turned the heaters on in the car a few minutes before we jump in and Yeah. [04:14] Manjula Kerai: But the daytime, daytime is really nice and I'm not complaining. Look, I come from a cold climate in the uk so I'm happy, [04:21] Dave Pengelley: fair enough. I did see, um, this pop up on x this week. Speaking of weather. Someone has built a Hermes agent that is trading weather predictions on poly market. [04:32] Marno Brits: That's beautiful. Oh, I love the internet so much. [04:37] Dave Pengelley: It's funny 'cause I, I've, as you guys know it, and we'll talk about it a bit later, I've got my chart reporter app for helping FX traders. And so when I think about trading, I think about money markets and things like that. I haven't explored the whole world of poly market where you can bet on anything at all, like [04:52] Marno Brits: literally anything. [04:53] Dave Pengelley: And so to see the people are betting on the weather, um, I mean trading, trading predictions, I mean on the weather [00:05:00] Wild [05:01] Manjula Kerai: a little bit. [05:02] Marno Brits: Did you see that one bloke that he went on Poly market, he made a bet that someone's gonna streak, I think it's at the Super Bowl. Then he went to the Super Bowl, he streaked, got the payout, paid the fine, and he was still up for the whole event. [05:17] Dave Pengelley: I mean, that's, that's clever. That's dodgy. That's so, sounds like [05:22] Marno Brits: Oh yeah. Leverage it. The market's there. [05:24] Dave Pengelley: I mean that, that's, that's like cricket players betting on the, the outcome and then throwing the game, right? Or boxes like that's [05:31] Marno Brits: Yeah, it's the wild west of cryptocurrency. 'cause it's so unregulated. [05:34] Marno Brits: People are just going crazy. I mean, even with the presidential election for Trump, they wanted to sue poll market because poll market was too close to the real voting power. But then in the same breath, there was also like an article shortly after that where, um, the guy called Brian Johnson, you guys know about him? [05:53] Marno Brits: The longevity guy. [05:54] Dave Pengelley: I thought he was the lead singer from AC CDC. [05:56] Marno Brits: No. Um, Brian Johnson does [00:06:00] longevity stuff and he measures everything about his health and one of those less PG audience. Um. He measures his, um, I guess performance like at nighttime when he goes to bed, like how, how high up he gets. And then people would bet on that to say, okay, cool. [06:18] Marno Brits: What's his testosterone at during the nighttime? And then you can bet on that level, which is ridiculous. [06:24] Dave Pengelley: I don't want to bet on what he's doing in the nighttime with [06:27] Marno Brits: his test. It's him sleeping. It's, it's him sleeping, but then measuring what his testosterone is doing while he's sleeping. [06:43] Dave Pengelley: Sorry, man, I didn't mean to hard cut you there. My fingers slipped on the mouse, but it's a good, good, an opportunity anyway for us to segue off, uh, of Brian Johnson's nocturnal habits and, uh, into, uh, a bit more of an AI operator show 'cause people are here to, to, to think about AI and business and operations [00:07:00] and what they're doing with all of those sorts of things. [07:02] Dave Pengelley: So, um, yes. Let's, let's, my Advil's kicking in, so I think I'm gonna be fine. Don't worry everyone, I've got coffee, I've got Advil. We we're gonna have a great show. It's gonna be fun. Um, there's a, we, we, uh, as people know if you're a regular visitor and tuner in, and if you're on the chat, say hello. That would be great. [07:20] Dave Pengelley: We'd love to hear from you and hear where you're at and what you're doing. But, uh, we are gonna talk about some of the, the news and things that is happening in the world of ai and I'm keen to hear from everyone what, uh, you are seeing in the news. So let's talk about the news. [07:40] AI VO: Welcome to the AI update. Let's look at what's happening in the news. [07:48] Dave Pengelley: We didn't have that last time you were with us. Did, did we, Amber? We didn't have the, the stingers and stuff. [07:52] Amber Hills: No, but I would love to know, like, is there some kind of highlights first and then [00:08:00] for the operators to speak into? 'cause that would be cool and quite entertaining [08:04] Dave Pengelley: as, as far as. [08:06] Amber Hills: Like, [08:06] Dave Pengelley: uh, like a clips reel [08:08] Amber Hills: today, tonight, blah, blah, blah. [08:09] Amber Hills: And you know how they do like the quick, [08:12] Dave Pengelley: ah, no, I'm not, I'm not that organized. That would require a lot more, uh, of me sharing for this show, um, that I haven't, haven't done because I'm busy as, as all of you are trying to build business and run business. And so, uh, well this is an important part of what we do and we wanna add value. [08:27] Dave Pengelley: I don't have time to create whole clips of highlights of this week in the news. Um, but there is a lot of things and so one of the things that, like mano, you said your app broke. One of the things my app didn't break, but I had to, um, get ahead of it and roll all my API keys is because CEL had a breach. [08:47] Dave Pengelley: Do you guys hear about this CEL breach? Oh [08:48] Marno Brits: no. Don't, [08:51] Dave Pengelley: I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but basically someone, um, social engineering, someone got into some, some guy cel left their [00:09:00] keys at the pub or whatever, or. Someone whispered sweet nothing's in their ear and they gave them their password. I, I don't know the exact story, but there was some issue where, uh, cel employees con, um, con con, uh, what do you call the login credentials? [09:16] Marno Brits: Yeah. [09:17] Dave Pengelley: His credentials were picked up and someone got access into CEL Systems and stole a whole bunch of their encrypted at rests data and then traversed further into the system and took more data. Um, and so they sent out an emergency thing saying, Hey, some people, like all your keys were encrypted, but just for double checking and for safes, you should go and reset all your API keys that you were storing on our servers. [09:42] AI VO: Wow. [09:44] Dave Pengelley: Good stuff. Yeah. Um, and I have my app hosted on Versal, and while I didn't get the critical you must do it list, I, they did just say just everyone should do it. So I was like, okay, I'll [00:10:00] go through. I didn't realize I had like eight API keys across four different systems that I had to roll. Took me nearly an hour just to go and change API keys and make sure that then the app was still working and everything, um, hung together and I was really spooning because I just, well, it was actually good because one of the things I have in my app, I dunno about you guys with your apps and things, but I have some API endpoints that I have on CloudFlare and they were using the same database key as the main site and I actually separated them over the weekend and went, okay, the workers should have their own access database key and, and that and, and that because. [10:33] Dave Pengelley: I'd, um, got Codex through a full review of all my code, and it found that I was actually storing my database key in some of the script files that had gone to GitHub and stuff. So I was like, okay, I to roll, roll all my keys anyway, thank you Codex for finding that. Um, and so I just split the key. So fortunately I only had to change it in one place there, but there just, it just was a huge thing to go through and, and roll all these keys. [11:00] Dave Pengelley: So if you were doing anything with Elle, go in and took Elle's credit, [11:00] Dave Pengelley: they got ahead, they told people, and when I went into the platform, it actually had tagged next to all the en all my environmental keys said, re-roll this one, re-roll this one. So it actually told me which of the ones [11:10] Marno Brits: Yeah. [11:11] Manjula Kerai: Ah, [11:11] Dave Pengelley: that it, it realized were the ones that I should be replacing. [11:15] Dave Pengelley: So [11:16] Amber Hills: I'll be doing that. [11:19] Manjula Kerai: And I [11:20] Dave Pengelley: amber's like, I've gotta leave this call now. Sorry guys. [11:25] Manjula Kerai: I hope everyone got that message that they've got to roll their keys, you know, because imagine if, um, Al hasn't been able to communicate with everyone. [11:32] Dave Pengelley: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, um, here's a news article from [11:39] Amber Hills: it's [11:39] Dave Pengelley: and Micro on it [11:40] Amber Hills: that is not the fun stuff, like the backend, that back backend. [11:45] Marno Brits: Yeah. [11:47] Dave Pengelley: Yeah. So how do I, uh, compromise third party or wealth application number long live password, independent access to CELs internal systems, demonstrating how allworth trust relationships can bypass traditional perimeter defenses. [11:59] Marno Brits: [00:12:00] Mm-hmm. [12:00] Dave Pengelley: Impact was amplified by CELs environment variable model, where credentials not explicitly marked as sensitive were readable with internal access. [12:06] Dave Pengelley: Meaning that any team whose access was compromised nonsensitive environment variables were exposed without additional controls. Um, it's, it's one of these weird, like, and as I was going through, I was thinking about 'em and, uh. The, the way, like if, if you've ever created an API key, normally in most systems you get to see it once and it says, make sure you save this because you'll never see this again. [12:27] Dave Pengelley: Because then they encrypt it. Yeah. And then when you go to authenticate, it actually does the encrypted to the encrypted and you never see the real one. [12:34] Marno Brits: Yeah. [12:35] Dave Pengelley: Um, but versel, when you save these things as environment variables, while they're saying it encrypts it at rest, you can still see the raw version in their, um, so they Oh. [12:49] Dave Pengelley: Version that you're saving there. [12:51] AI VO: Mm. [12:51] Dave Pengelley: Which is where this sort of thing comes in, where all of a sudden, like you can look at any of your keys anytime. [12:59] Manjula Kerai: Oh, [00:13:00] and it's a shame we can't get Claude code to, you know, roll all of our keys for us because you've got to manually put them into the file so that they're kind of not being pushed up to GitHub and all of that. [13:10] Dave Pengelley: Well, and also you don't necessarily want your keys in the LLM being indexed. [13:13] Amber Hills: Exactly, [13:14] Manjula Kerai: exactly. [13:15] Dave Pengelley: Um, [13:15] Manjula Kerai: on being compromised. Right? [13:17] Dave Pengelley: Yeah. So when, whenever like you've, you've given your LLM access to a key for doing some kind of testing before you push that out to anything you need to re-roll that key. Yeah. Um, so yeah, that was, that was a pretty big news thing that impacted me personally. [13:31] Dave Pengelley: And I, and I've gone and changed the essential, most essential stuff. A few things that might be like the contact form on a, on on one of my websites. I haven't gone through and done all of everything to the nth degree yet. I've gotta go and do a full order. But my main SaaS app, I went through and made sure all my super base keys and everything, uh, were re-roll. [13:49] Dave Pengelley: Um, [13:49] Marno Brits: good point. Yeah, if you can, I got the applications I have to go back to now, but yeah, that sucks. [13:56] Manjula Kerai: I haven't started yet, so I'm all right for now. [13:59] Amber Hills: Oh, I've got [00:14:00] some things up there on there. [14:02] Marno Brits: Yeah. [14:03] Amber Hills: But no, that's good awareness, Dave. I appreciate that. [14:06] Dave Pengelley: Mm-hmm. I mean, a few comments, uh, Matt, he couldn't join us, but he is joining us. [14:10] Dave Pengelley: Uh, it makes you think how many keys we leave in plain text on our own machines. A hundred percent. [14:14] Marno Brits: Oh, too many. [14:15] Dave Pengelley: Either of [14:16] Marno Brits: us. Too many [14:17] Dave Pengelley: Sean's warning. The only keys that weren't flagged, uh, that weren't flagged as secrets so far. Um, so yeah, like it does mark, the ones that, but double check all of the things that you've got in as environment variables. [14:28] Dave Pengelley: Just, just double check. Anything that you think is critical that needs to be rolling, um, that could be a risk are, um, yeah, it's, yeah. Pretty crazy. And I know, I know some people don't like for various reasons, and so maybe they're like, see, this is, this is what I'm saying. Put it on, put it on somewhere else. [14:46] Dave Pengelley: Um, [14:47] Marno Brits: no, there's always another, it's like Pete piece to argue, a person to argue. 'cause when CloudFlare went down, everyone's like, oh, this sells the best. The sale is gonna go down. Everybody's like, oh, cloud firm is the best. [14:57] Dave Pengelley: Yeah. Railway's next, right? Sorry, Matt. [14:59] Marno Brits: Yeah, [00:15:00] yeah. We're all, it's just about like, you, you're always going to get hacked. [15:04] Marno Brits: It's just about when, and then making sure you are protected when that happens. [15:08] Dave Pengelley: And depending on what scale you're operating at. Like someone like me with my, with my, my, my SaaS app, it's, it's fairly early days. Limited number of customers, limited impact, limited sort of as they say, blast radius. Um, but if you are running higher value, higher production, things that with multiple users and, and business critical application sort of environments mm-hmm. [15:27] Dave Pengelley: That's where you've gotta start thinking about, you know, multiple fail safes and running on different servers and having fallbacks and so on. So having more advanced infrastructure, which, you know, we'll get into this a bit later, but, uh, and when we discussed this last week where we were discussing where do you need humans in the loop? [15:44] Dave Pengelley: Like, do you need humans? Can you just identify everything and have a single person business with no other experts and just humans? Um, but. Where do you get the knowledge to know these things? [15:53] Amber Hills: Hmm. [15:54] Dave Pengelley: Yep. [15:55] Amber Hills: Yeah. It's good awareness. Like this is [00:16:00] the kind of conversations I think people would really appreciate, especially around the things that would protect them as a developer. [16:07] Amber Hills: Anyone using ai, you know, because even from a, you know, whether you're a developer or whether you are someone, um, hiring someone to do dev, they wanna make sure that, uh, everything's safe and secure. So I think this is a great conversation to have. Not, you know, more than once just to help people put things in place. [16:28] Dave Pengelley: Yeah. [16:28] Amber Hills: Mm-hmm. [16:29] Marno Brits: That's a great part. Um, whenever I meet with any clients, I'm gonna show them the. Have I been porn website where you type in your email address and see if you've been breached. [16:38] Amber Hills: Mm-hmm. [16:38] Marno Brits: And that's almost always a shocker. 'cause if they've had a Gmail account or an account for more than five years, they have been breached. [17:00] Marno Brits: They just dunno about it. And then immediately they're like, oh crap. Like, what's happened? But then luckily it told you, okay, if it's been passed, if it's, if it's usernames or it's just photos, um, but that gives them into that right mindset of like, okay, crap. It's not that, um, it's not happening to [17:00] Marno Brits: me that I'm special, it's that maybe it's happened in the background and you're not aware what's actually going on. [17:05] Marno Brits: I mean, a funware is, even looking at your Microsoft login attempts, you'll probably see there's hundreds per day happening all around the world, but you just don't see it. Especially now with ai, it's all prominent. It's, it's constantly going and it's running at such a pace that we can't keep up. Yeah. But that's why you put in the protocols to, to make sure you stay safe. [17:23] Amber Hills: Mm-hmm. [17:23] Dave Pengelley: Yep. And, and, and phish phishing and social engineering is still one of the biggest risks, right? Like I'm getting emails apparently from my own HR department of my, my current business. That's mine. And I don't have a HR department sending me, um, [17:36] Amber Hills: I love [17:36] Dave Pengelley: it. Documents to download and things to sign, and warnings about new policies. [17:40] Dave Pengelley: And I'm like far out. Like if you're in a big organization, you didn't know any better. You just see this thing come in and you go, oh, HR needs me to sign a new thing. [17:48] Marno Brits: Mm-hmm. [17:49] Dave Pengelley: Like, it's, it's crazy. Um, [17:52] Amber Hills: it's easy, isn't it? It's um, it is scary because you're right, people do take, um, [00:18:00] yeah, they, they just all work on autopilot, you know? [18:03] Amber Hills: They just trust the fact that it's come from a higher level. So. [18:09] Dave Pengelley: Yep. [18:11] Amber Hills: And [18:11] Manjula Kerai: then, [18:12] Amber Hills: uh, sorry. [18:13] Manjula Kerai: Sorry. Go on Amber. [18:14] Amber Hills: No, I was gonna say, I see we got Doug from California. That's really cool. [18:18] Marno Brits: Hmm. Hey, Doug [18:20] Amber Hills: here. [18:23] Dave Pengelley: Brilliant. Great to have you with us, Doug, on uh, on LinkedIn? Yes. We're, we're streaming on LinkedIn. Good. Good to have you there. [18:28] Dave Pengelley: Um, another, another thing that, uh, popped up in the news when it comes to this vibe, coding and experts and thinking about infrastructure and engineering, which the vibe coding engines don't necessarily do. They just do what you tell them to and they do as much as that. And, um, I saw this one pop up on the LinkedIn, um, can you read that one? [19:00] Dave Pengelley: Is that popping up? Uh, which is a vibe coded SaaS shut down 72 hours after launch because users figured out they could upgrade themselves to pro by changing one value in the browser. The founder built it entirely with ai, zero handwritten [19:00] Dave Pengelley: code, the checkout flow works, Stripe payments, process payments, subscribers got access. [19:03] Dave Pengelley: But the app decided premium access based on a database field that any authenticated user could update open dev tools. So that's the old SQL injection thing that we've talked about. [19:11] Marno Brits: Mm-hmm. [19:11] Dave Pengelley: So people just. Pushed to the database that they're a pro user, no payment required, um, no RLS road level security, and they were fully upgraded. [19:22] Dave Pengelley: Um, now it's interesting that they, they just shut down it, or whether they, they, they shut down and regrouped. But, um, this is like, again, these vibe coding things. If you don't have the engineering understanding or expertise, or you don't get the right adversarial prompts in place to challenge these things [19:41] Manjula Kerai: mm-hmm. [19:41] Dave Pengelley: Um, [19:43] Manjula Kerai: could be dangerous. [19:44] Dave Pengelley: Yeah. Like even myself, the fact that I had my database key in some scripts, I'm like, when did that happen? I don't know when that happened at some point and picked it up outta my NV file and bolted it in as, as this fail safe. It's like, oh, use the key, or just use this hard coded value. [20:00] Dave Pengelley: That's [20:00] Dave Pengelley: what was in my script, and I'm like, what is going on? Why did we do that? Mm-hmm. [20:04] Amber Hills: I said the same thing happen. [20:06] Dave Pengelley: Yeah. [20:07] Amber Hills: With the pain. Yeah, yeah, [20:08] Dave Pengelley: yeah. [20:09] Amber Hills: It is the thing, like they will, it will just go and do its own thing. And, uh, you have to really, um, be across it. You can't just make assumptions like, oh, it's fine. [20:18] Amber Hills: You know, it will bite you later. So. [20:20] Marno Brits: Mm-hmm. [20:21] Amber Hills: I think having, um, yeah, it is really good to get across knowing how, you know, what to look for, how to pull it apart, how to challenge it. Mm-hmm. Um, I think that, I know there's a lot of talk about, oh, we're going into an era where there's no, we'll be, you know, no coding and all this kind of stuff, but I actually think that's little bit, I don't know, not dangerous, but how do we do the checks and measures? [21:00] Amber Hills: How can we ensure that, um, these agents aren't well, that they're safe, they're doing the things that we need to, you know. [21:00] Amber Hills: Yeah, [21:00] Dave Pengelley: and, and you know, they generate so much data so quickly. Having a a good audit trail is really hard. And then having the ability for humans, and, you know, maybe it's not so much humans all the time, but getting away from some of the AI stuff back to the deterministic. [21:13] Dave Pengelley: Just code. Just code that, you know, if you put in a, it's always gonna provide you b like that actually verifies and checks things and looks for these things and flags them. Um, because we're only getting more automated. And, um, more of these agents, whether it's the Hermes agent or the Open Clause, or Claude Cowork and all these things that are, are great accelerators. [21:34] Dave Pengelley: Like it's amazing for this show this week. I, I, and I'll save it for the wind of the week. I'll, I'll, I'll come back to that. [21:39] Marno Brits: I do wanna add there, like, I feel like a key word you said there and used was verify. It's very much that approach of trust but verify, um, a great methodology. Like rather than, okay, cool. [22:00] Marno Brits: We have to read every line of code is being aware and putting up the guard rails. And I know, um, Blake Sims, part of the community's part of the [22:00] Marno Brits: chat as well, his, um, school community course, he's, it's purely operating on this first principals and fundamentals approach, but then understanding that you can set up guardrails to still help you navigate that so you don't have to review 20,000 lines of the code, but knowing how to leverage the AI to do the work, but also check the work. [22:21] Marno Brits: Yeah. And then you just verify it before you publish it online. So there's this phased approaches rather than just vibe coding it into a live production site, which is just bad practice regardless of what you're doing. [22:32] Amber Hills: Mm-hmm. [22:33] Marno Brits: I'm taking the same approach as like if you bring in a new employee, you're not, if it's a person, you're not even gonna give them full access to admin side. [22:40] Marno Brits: You're just gonna get them to do their jobs and slowly trust. Them and build up the credibility. And once they've passed those entry jobs, then you'll give up more access because you've actually trained them on how to think, but if you don't do the training, it's gonna make mistakes. [22:54] Dave Pengelley: But, but even you even like then, like there's a certain point where you can only trust to a degree, I [00:23:00] think with those things. [23:01] Dave Pengelley: Um, and, and this comes across different models. Like, like my, my thing, I built it mostly in one platform. Like a lot of my app was built in anti-gravity using a lot of Gemini. Uh, and then I got Codex to do the adversarial review. And, and as many of you know, you've been following for a while, I often call my adversarial security agent kryptonite because looking for the weaknesses and the weak points. [23:20] Dave Pengelley: So I, I get kryptonite to run a full security review, but different models are gonna pull that apart and, and look for different things. Right. So getting different models. You, you, like anyone, you don't check your own work. You don't go to a trivia night and get tables to mark their own sheet. You always pass it Yeah. [23:36] Dave Pengelley: Aside and get someone else to mark the homework. [23:39] Amber Hills: I, I think, sorry. [23:42] Dave Pengelley: Amber go. I was [23:43] Amber Hills: gonna say, I think there's like, there's two elements here. You know, one is having, uh, a level, just some foundations, you know, just understanding of what to look for. [23:54] Dave Pengelley: Mm-hmm. [23:55] Amber Hills: I think Blake's like, I've been doing his school community and I tell you what, it has made a huge [00:24:00] difference. [24:00] AI VO: Mm-hmm. [24:01] Amber Hills: I was giving me the confide. To just, you know, I'm not looking at a screen and it's just gibberish. I can actually understand it. So I think there's a level of having, you know, building yourself with the confidence and having some kind of awareness, what to look for just from a base level. And then the second thing is having obviously, um, agents that can challenge and, and, um, do the whole, um, audit, you know Yeah. [24:27] Amber Hills: Everything as you go along. Because that's how the, how the A API key got exposed. The, the agent told me, you know, I'm like, you need to change this straight away. Mm-hmm. Okay. So like, have that agent to bring things to my attention as things are getting built in real time. Like, I think that's, uh, it's a step that I think a lot of people do miss, but it's a step that you can't miss. [24:50] Dave Pengelley: Yeah. And especially people that are just using lovable and bolt, which, which have their place. But if people are trying to push production apps, and I'm guessing, I don't know, but that case where they shut their SAS down after 72 hours. [00:25:00] I would almost bet money on poly market that that was, that was a lovable build, uh, where they've just pumped something out very quickly and it's all on one platform. [25:08] Dave Pengelley: And didn't, didn't have, they, the user probably didn't even know what row level security was. They've, they've never thought about any of that kind of stuff. They just went, no, no, we built the database for me and look, it's there and, and look it brought, 'cause I know I, people that have built lovable things and they're like, look, and it's got stripe and it's got everything and you know, it's got everything for everyone to see. [25:27] Dave Pengelley: Um, but I mean Sean makes a great point here that, uh, given the volume of code that these things can ship compared to human, it needs to be reviewed, verified, that kind of failure is something that's gonna keep hap keep happening, having happening with purely vibe coded solutions. So. [25:41] Marno Brits: Mm-hmm. [25:41] Dave Pengelley: Um, and you know, people are getting more and more confident with these agents and, and things. [25:45] Dave Pengelley: MasterCard accelerates iPad commerce with Australia's first authenticated agentic transactions Using Agent pay. [25:52] Marno Brits: Yeah. [25:54] Dave Pengelley: Oh, so now they're creating special payment processing cards and credit unlocks for [00:26:00] open clause and agents and stuff. So that way you can give your AI a budget and tell it it can go and buy stuff. [26:07] Manjula Kerai: Interesting. [26:08] Dave Pengelley: Wild [26:09] Marno Brits: Do us to see if they're gonna get the, the support. I mean, there's a big push from the build not bought. Why would we still use them? We can just build our own payment processor using cryptocurrency, for example. Why would they, why, why would we want to give them another percentage if they already have what? [26:26] Marno Brits: 70% profit revenues? I mean, it's a cool initiative. I, I love the initiative. I'm here four because fair currency mate. [26:33] Dave Pengelley: When we're not, we're not all running on Bitcoin or, [26:35] Marno Brits: or [26:35] Dave Pengelley: Ethereum, [26:36] Marno Brits: but that's for humans. What about the agents? What makes more sense for them? [26:40] Dave Pengelley: Look, I think, well, it'll be interesting to see how blockchain currencies and stuff evolve with this new generation, but people still think in dollars and cents. [26:49] Marno Brits: Yeah, no, I, I see the argument, I see the point for both, and I'm keen to see where this goes, but I'm curious, trying to think long term, where are we going to be when the agents [00:27:00] are doing the work? Like, are you, you are at a disadvantage if you're trying to follow traditional paths. So what does the next level look like? [27:08] Amber Hills: I, I'm witho and like, honestly, I feel like the, the gap is actually the influence behind a shift. Like we are, as Dave just said, you know, the norm is still dollars and cents, you know, requires, I guess those big people to influence people to make the change. And I think that's probably where we're gonna see things really move towards. [27:32] Amber Hills: Yeah, [27:34] Dave Pengelley: more people need to read the Bitcoin standard and get orange peeled, uh, and head down that path. Um, all right, let's, let's talk about, um, I think that's enough news headlines. Let's talk about how we've gone with winds of the Week.[00:28:00] [28:05] Amber Hills: I appreciate it. I really do love the. The little chazen, like the, the show. Yeah. [28:14] Dave Pengelley: I, I do like a good stinger. Um, I mean, I grew up watching shows like David Letterman, where he was big and having little segment intros and things like that. So I'm, I'm a fan. Very, uh, any, any wins of the week, but I, I'm happy to share first if you want me to kick off or I can. [28:28] Dave Pengelley: I'll, um, I'm Kim from all You [28:30] Marno Brits: Go [28:30] Amber Hills: for it. [28:31] Dave Pengelley: So we talk about all these agents and doing stuff and they, they do produce so much data. So I've got in cowork set up, I've got my daily routines. I get a a dawn email. I get a dusk email, and I've got a heartbeat that fires every hour just reviewing through all my, my linear tasks. [29:00] Dave Pengelley: And it knows, you know, every second hour do this and every third hour do that. So it's not trying to do everything every hour. Um, and I've gotta connect it into linear, which I'm using as sort of my task management board system. Uh, and I can put comments in linear and we'll read the comments. And then on the next iteration of the [29:00] Dave Pengelley: heartbeat, it'll actually do some work on that and allocate it to one of my subagents to, to do stuff. [29:05] Dave Pengelley: All within cowork, like I'm not running any fancy open clause or anything. And so prepping for this week's show, I was like, okay, Matt dropped out. That's great. Matt's busy. He needs to focus on that. I was like, that's cool. And I reached out to Manjula and, and you were kind enough to say, yep. Um, and no, Richard was away. [29:19] Dave Pengelley: I was like, well, we're still a person down. So I reached out to you, Amber, and, and welcome back. It's great to have you here. But I was, it was prepping me based on last week's transcript was going, are you gonna talk about harnesses this week? So send out a, a brief to the, the team that we're gonna talk about harnesses and go into this and that. [29:32] Dave Pengelley: And I was like, oh yeah, but Matt's not gonna be there. And like those from all the transcripts that Matt's deep in the harness conversation that we're talking about last week with Natalia. Uh, and so I said, oh, but I'm gonna bring in, um, Manjula from Lime Digital and that's all I put in there. And in the next hourly beat he goes, oh, I don't know who that is. [30:00] Dave Pengelley: I need to. Research that person. Then in the next hour, I campaign and said, cool, here's my research dossier on LY digital and the smart syllabus assistant work, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Uh, and [30:00] Dave Pengelley: then I said, okay, cool, and I'm gonna bring in Amber. And again, it's sort of on, I was just commenting on linear and every hour my, my co-work was reading those notes, going away, doing some work, doing some research, doing some planning and ideation around what the show should structure should be, and then coming back. [30:15] Dave Pengelley: And the next thing with an update in linear was, was wild. I was like, actually, like I was just delegating work and commenting to a coworker and they were just doing stuff. I didn't have to give them a lot of instruction. Um, I even just took a punt with you. I didn't give it any links, manjula, nothing. I just said Manjula from Limes Digital. [30:30] Dave Pengelley: And it went and found you and looked you up and came up with, uh, with the data. It was awesome. [30:36] Manjula Kerai: I'd love to see what you came up with. [30:38] Dave Pengelley: Oh, well I'll send you that afterwards. But, um, yeah, but it, it went and, you know, I did, didn't forgot to do this at the start on your intro, but, um. It went and found out that you've got the smart syllabus assistant and what you're doing with all that and told me that Yeah. [30:52] Dave Pengelley: It, it, it worked it out Just from your name and your, your core umbrella business name. Wild. [30:59] Manjula Kerai: [00:31:00] That is pretty amazing. Um, yeah, I mean, I've, I've been improving the smart syllabus assistant and I just got off a call before we joined, before I joined here. Um, and so now I've got it, um, picking up the syllabus from Vanessa website. [31:14] Manjula Kerai: Mm-hmm. So teachers don't have to upload the syllabus in order to get their lesson plans behind. So big wins happening. Um, and for a one person job, do one person, uh, you know, company doing this, it's like a five person team mm-hmm. That would normally do this. Um, it's just amazing. [31:32] Dave Pengelley: Nice. Nice. [31:34] Manjula Kerai: Really enjoying myself speaking to a lot of teachers and learning their struggles and mm-hmm. [31:40] Manjula Kerai: You know, I really wanna get this into every teacher's hands. Yeah. Every teacher's hands if possible. But it's very difficult to get AI into schools 'cause a lot of schools aren't even allowed to use AI and they have their own thing, which is edu chat. [31:53] Marno Brits: Yeah. [31:53] Manjula Kerai: Uh, which is, um, comes from the department. [32:00] Manjula Kerai: They're allowed to use that. I wonder if I can get an API key for that. 'cause then I [32:00] Manjula Kerai: can use that to do this. [32:01] Marno Brits: Yeah. Good. Like the government is pain in the ass when it comes to that. It's so, so tightly knit. Even working with, uh, company, oh, organization in Ali, they do a bunch of grants and. Purely just like for the love of the game and supporting businesses, they just wanna get the right grants in the right people's hands. [32:21] Marno Brits: That's it, right? [32:22] AI VO: Mm-hmm. [32:22] Marno Brits: But there's no API, there's no way for you to talk stuff. There's five different websites you have to manually go to. And same, same problem. It's like, no, they're building their own ai. You can't sell, sell anything. They can't use Chatt BT. So they're so handicapped and it's like, no, like people like yourself have built cool stuff to remove that barrier, make it easy. [33:00] Marno Brits: It's still safe, it's still compliant, but the government has just so tightly knit. So if you can find an API go for it. But I'm now looking at like, trying to get cps, so like a playwright MCP to instead go and do the clicking for me. Ah, but it's just such a pain in the ass. 'cause you're trying to add value [33:00] Marno Brits: and they just straints for real reasons. [33:03] Dave Pengelley: You, you need to add, [33:03] Manjula Kerai: look into the cps. Yeah. [33:06] Dave Pengelley: Add an MP India or app manual. So, um, I share so many wins a week, but I built an MCP into my chart reporter app. Which was awesome because one of the things I do is, you know, double trying to get algorithms to do the trading for me on the markets. And then my tool does all the, the capture and journaling and tagging of, of the results. [33:24] Dave Pengelley: And so now I can, within my development environment where I'm building the robots, I can then tell it to go MCP into my reporting app, pull the stats, and then do an analysis to then feed straight back into writing the robots. Mm-hmm. I'm just using Claude code inside my IDE where I'm writing my robots, but now it can MCP into my platform to get the analytics and bring that into my development environment. [33:47] Dave Pengelley: So it's, it's cool. So you could build an MCP in smart syllabus assistant, and then if the EDU chat allows 'em to add cps, then they could stay in edu chat, but just MCP out to you to get that stuff maybe. [33:59] Manjula Kerai: [00:34:00] Yeah. I really love the way dev developers think 'cause they're always thinking of how to solve a problem. [34:06] Manjula Kerai: But if it's not a straightforward thing, they're always finding, uh, a workaround. [34:11] Marno Brits: Yeah. There's many, many ways, especially with Matt. Matt is a, a genius of that. He is. Brain works very, very differently. Um, I love the, I'm MOUs of it. [34:20] Manjula Kerai: And then the thing about schools, like, um, they're not, Stu teachers aren't allowed to use ai, but many of them are, you know, um, yeah. [34:29] Manjula Kerai: And the schools, I don't know if they're like oblivious to it or [34:34] Dave Pengelley: I've got friends that are, that are in, uh, in the Anglican school systems here in, in Sydney and they had a whole day on Monday with AI vendors and providers doing an AI day about ai. Um, the whole sort of Anglican ed system. So some schools and some parts, and some people are doing more or less in ai, whether again, third party apps like yours and how you get authorized and get on those sort of. [35:00] Dave Pengelley: This is a whole different kettle of [35:00] Dave Pengelley: fish. [35:00] Manjula Kerai: I've actually got a meeting with, um, the, uh, what's it called? Head of secondary in the diocese. The diocese. [35:07] Dave Pengelley: They're nice. [35:08] Manjula Kerai: So, so yeah, I've got a meeting with them. It's a step in the right direction. So let's see what, what we can do to have our working together. [35:15] Dave Pengelley: Sweet. To [35:16] Manjula Kerai: get this AI in, you know, [35:18] Dave Pengelley: sounds, sounds like some wins. Wind on the way that, that's awesome. Um, [35:21] Manjula Kerai: yeah. [35:21] Dave Pengelley: A amber, how, how have you gone this week for, for wins? You've been, like you said you went, did your tour, you were like, talking about pineapples, like what's, what's going on with you? [35:30] Amber Hills: Yeah. Before I dive into me, I just wanna say, when Jill, you made a really, you made a statement, that thing that you could actually highlight further into the leads, the, the teachers that you talk to, right? [36:00] Amber Hills: So if they're already using ai, you know, it's essentially like closing down that barrier, like normalizing it. So if they're thinking like, oh, we can't use ai. There's this resistance, we'll get in trouble, whatever it is, you know, going in with a, you guys are already using ai, right? You guys know that note [36:00] Amber Hills: takers, you know this, that like, this is no different. [36:04] Amber Hills: So like, kind of like, you know, closing that gap of we use this to, oh, we're actually really using something very similar, so this is no different. Then it makes their mind to be more receptive and open to listening to what you're about to share with them. So my brain's always got like a same psychology hat on. [36:24] Amber Hills: So when you said that, I was just like, oh, bring that to your attention because that's a great angle to kind of get your foot in the door. [36:31] Manjula Kerai: Yeah, definitely using that. Thanks for that number. [36:34] Amber Hills: That's okay. Um, yes, this week. I mean, this week if I just talk this week. Yeah. So cs, um, I've got a webinar tomorrow. [36:44] Amber Hills: So again, I always try to create lots of touch points when it comes to. Uh, offering something. [36:53] Dave Pengelley: Mm-hmm. [36:53] Amber Hills: Obviously you can't just say, Hey, I've made a product, buy it from me. It doesn't work. Okay. I would love [00:37:00] that, but know what I'm [37:00] Dave Pengelley: doing wrong. [37:02] Amber Hills: Yeah. Well this is the thing. I think like, um, it is, it's, uh, an assumption I guess, that we get really excited in creating a solution that could be a really, you know, great product, but if we haven't built the relationship, we can't expect them to take it from us, you know? [37:20] Amber Hills: So, um, I mean, when I do, when I speak at events, it's really just another touch point building a relationship. Um, yeah, I mean, I love building connection. I really love, you know, my background is business consulting, so like I really love connecting one-on-one groups doesn't matter, and helping them, you know, take away their pain. [38:00] Amber Hills: Um, and I think when it comes to business. Uh, it's been even more exciting the space I am now because this is like the extra, this is the cherry on the top. Mm-hmm. You know, like you give someone a business strategy and say, this is what you need and you [38:00] Amber Hills: probably haven't even worked out. You probably don't even know that you need this thing as well because you're a, you know, the pathway to growth. [38:07] Marno Brits: Yeah. [38:08] Amber Hills: And then you put AI on top of that and you're just like, now we've got a fricking accelerated machine. Like, you know, [38:15] Marno Brits: actually, [38:16] Amber Hills: yeah. I guess my wins is, um, building more relationships, connecting with more founders, directors, um, hearing about their biggest pain points, hearing about what they really need, uh, educating them what they actually need as well. [38:34] AI VO: Mm-hmm. [38:35] Amber Hills: Um, meaning, you know, sometimes something they find painful isn't the thing that's actually going to fill in the bucket. You know, what's really leaking, what's really keeping their business stuck. So there, there's two different things to look at. [38:49] Marno Brits: Mm-hmm. [38:49] Amber Hills: Um, but yeah, I'm loving it. I'm loving doing all of this. [38:55] Marno Brits: That's amazing. I love that. Um, I'm fascinated by that, that psychological [00:39:00] approach, especially from the business consulting side. 'cause I'm fighting myself, um, as the audience would know, I know Dave and Matt as well as the past, what, seven months I've been part of a mentorship, trying to get clear on my purpose, the vision for the company, why do I do what I do and what's really the vehicle of getting me there. [39:20] Marno Brits: Right. And that's gone from voice agents to just consulting to just websites. And now it's just the education side. Like, finally, finally finding something that I can do 24 7 if we're all being paid the same wage, this is what I'll do forever. Like, I, I just love the similar thing, the connections and the education. [40:00] Marno Brits: Seeing that shift in mindset is amazing. Mm-hmm. Um, now going into, okay, purpose is to educate the world on the importance of ownership. And then trying to allow myself almost over the past week to shift away from, okay, you are selling ai. You're selling ai, you're selling ai. Because I [40:00] Marno Brits: kept, like, I've had this fear that was unconscious of like, I don't wanna miss the hype of the AI train, but then realizing that I don't really care about ai, I care about like the results, and I wanna help you take more ownership of your life and your business and take control of what's actually going on and getting to the root cause of why you started the business. [40:19] Marno Brits: And AI is just a tool, part of toolkit to help you get there. [40:23] Amber Hills: Mm-hmm. [40:23] Marno Brits: And that shift of exactly that amber of like, it's letting them know, okay, this might be the pain point. But giving you more AI isn't gonna solve the pain point. We have to, we have to fix this first, and the AI is just the cherry on top. [40:37] Marno Brits: It's not the foundation. [40:38] Amber Hills: Mm-hmm. [40:39] Marno Brits: Yeah, [40:39] Amber Hills: exactly. What I shared in my talk last week [40:42] Marno Brits: mm-hmm. [40:43] Amber Hills: Um, in Cairnes was around that like, AI doesn't fix a broken process, it exposes it, you know? [40:49] Marno Brits: I like that. Yeah. [40:50] Amber Hills: Yeah. So getting them to think about their business, like it's not about what ai I got the audience to ask. [41:00] Amber Hills: Like, it's not about what AI tool should I [41:00] Amber Hills: use, it's about how is my business running right now? [41:03] Marno Brits: Yeah. [41:04] Amber Hills: Because, you know, yeah. AI is the tool to accelerate growth. Right. Then if you are, if you've got broken processes, and I see this all the time, like in businesses, like there are so many things clunky that aren't working. [41:21] Amber Hills: Mm-hmm. You know, businesses don't have stops, you know, send it. Operation procedures and yeah. Things like that. But, uh, I think for developers, you know, if there's developers listening, a really great way to, I guess, build trust with their prospect, with potential customer is having the understanding around, uh, what we're talking about right now, um, that it's not a tool that you're selling, you are selling literally the solution. [42:00] Amber Hills: And the solution starts way before the AI tool. Um, yeah. And I think this is where audits, you [42:00] Amber Hills: know, we talk a lot about audits and doing an audit of the business. Mm-hmm. Um. And I mean, that's my favorite, favorite, favorite part. 'cause that's all about business consulting, right? Because it's all about, it's, it's like digging in, it's getting deep into someone's business and seeing what's not working and um, and bringing some options for it. [42:22] Amber Hills: But I love that because what you are saying right now is you are really customer focused. [42:29] Marno Brits: Mm. [42:29] Amber Hills: You are. And that's, that's the thing. Everything we do isn't about us at all. It should never be. It should be about how are we serving, how can we actually make a difference and transform someone's life, business, and so forth. [42:45] Marno Brits: Hmm. I love that. Especially the word using serving, like that's exactly the, the methodology and the mindset I'm going into is. Like, and the fun part is like the less you care about the other things, the more they just fall into place. Like if you're [00:43:00] just focusing on like, all I want to do is produce this outcome. [43:03] Marno Brits: I want take you from experiencing this pain that I personally experienced. I wanted to get away from it. I found a way, this is the way, [43:09] Dave Pengelley: yeah. [43:10] Marno Brits: The, the it the best. [43:12] Dave Pengelley: The mistake a lot of people make when they pitch their business and their value is they pitch themselves as the hero of the story versus the helper. [43:18] Dave Pengelley: So like, everyone wants to be a hero. So don't go in there saying, you are Luke Skywalker. You need to go in as OB one or Yoda. And you need to be the helper that guides them on the way to their journey to going from sort of the, the apprentice and the novice to the conquering hero. And so always making sure your customer is the hero of the story at any marketing and pitching that you do. [43:39] Dave Pengelley: And you are, you are the helper and the assistant, the, the sage. [43:44] Marno Brits: Right. [43:44] Manjula Kerai: Yeah. [43:45] Marno Brits: Yeah. I've not, I've not thought about it that way. I think my, my, definitely my bottleneck was I get too carried away when I find a problem or when I find problems, I get excited about solving them. And my brain doesn't always package it neatly first. [44:00] Marno Brits: It's just okay [44:00] Marno Brits: years. Everything we, we do to solve your problems. Um, so I think I'll, I'll keep that on top of mind. 'cause my current approach is just stay curious. Like always ask why. Yeah. Because it's often in businesses, whether it's new businesses or old businesses, they're doing something because the person before them told her, this is how you do it. [44:18] Marno Brits: They never took the time or had the time to think about what's the best process to get this result that we want. It's no, someone run an SOP on a piece of paper five years ago while they were doing two different meetings and fixing a fire. And that's the process we're following for the past 10 years. [44:35] Marno Brits: Um, yeah. Um, [44:37] Amber Hills: this is, I love this conversation because it's a lot of psychology. My head's just going wild right now. Um, and even with what you're saying, mano and Dave, like both of you just highlighted this, like getting to know your customer. There's not making assumption that all customers are the same. [45:00] Amber Hills: They're not as far as what they're looking [45:00] Amber Hills: for as a partner, like transform and help them. Right. So what I mean by that is, and I do find there is a bit of a pattern [45:09] Marno Brits: yourself. [45:11] Amber Hills: There is a bit of a pattern with. The size of a company versus, you know, just, maybe it's just someone and their husband as far as what they're looking for with the solution and someone to lead it would be an extension of their business. [45:27] Amber Hills: Yeah, and I mean that in the way that, uh, and you can pick this up on a discovery call. You can, if you've studied people long enough, um, then you, sorry, my background is psychology. I don't know if you guys know that, so [45:40] Marno Brits: actually not, but that's awesome. That's great. [45:42] Amber Hills: I went from being a, a psychologist to into ai, um, but focused on organization, psych, a business psychology. [45:49] Amber Hills: Oh, [45:49] Marno Brits: okay. So, [45:51] Amber Hills: um, so you know, you'd pick up of, through the language that the business owner is using and that is around, um, [00:46:00] you know, they might be like, they want a leader, they want authoritative, they want someone that's like, okay, I'm too busy. You take this ship. Sometimes control is a big thing with a lot of directors. [46:10] Amber Hills: You know, you hear the saying that it's my baby. I can't let my baby go. It's really hard to hand over, you know, to get, to make decisions. We are no different. So there needs to be a level of helper, um, that kind of language that we are just here to help you and we're not taking away power from the decision maker, from the CEO. [46:32] Amber Hills: So knowing, just kind of tuning in to what your customer, like, what kind of energy your customer is, is going to be very helpful as well to building that relationship, that trust, you know, whether it's pre-sale or even during the journey does make a big difference too, just with the, um, partnership and the journey you have as well in working with them. [46:58] Marno Brits: I like that a lot. I, uh, [00:47:00] methodology that one of my mentors uses is. Think of it like when you go to see a, a doctor, you don't want to get to the doctor. And then the doctor asks you, so what are we doing today? Like, you want to have some sort of leadership, but then he still asks you, okay, how do you feel like, you know, when you go there, he's going to lead you into the path of getting healthier or getting better, right? [47:22] Amber Hills: Mm-hmm. [47:22] Marno Brits: But he has that framework that he is going to use, but you are still a part of it. [47:26] Amber Hills: Mm-hmm. [47:26] Marno Brits: And I like that. I like that mindset. A lot of the swift of Yeah, definitely don't shoot my dad could never end well. Um, and yeah, I, I like that a lot. I wanna keep playing with that. Thank you for that, Amber. [47:39] Amber Hills: No, I love the example you just gave as well. [47:41] Amber Hills: Like that's something everyone can relate to when they go and see a doctor. I think that's fantastic that you, you put that in there. [47:48] Marno Brits: Mm, [47:49] Dave Pengelley: brilliant. Brilliant. Well, um, lots to think, lots to ponder there around how you can, uh, connect with your customers and, uh, but all these solutions, it's [00:48:00] all around helping them hit their goals. [48:01] Dave Pengelley: It's not around the specific technology. AI is just one of the tools in the toolkit, which what we often say, AI is the tagline. Like, you don't buy a tv that doesn't say it's got AI in it anymore because you're like, why would I want the one without ai? But at the end of the day, you wanna watch TV on it. [48:14] Dave Pengelley: It doesn't really need ai that's just a marketing tag that everything has to have the, the latest badge on it. Um, yeah. And so a, a lot of the business consultants in, in general are all saying now with ai, um, because that gets their foot in the door to open the conversation to the actual real problems. [48:31] Dave Pengelley: Let's dive into the, uh, a bit of a deep dive for the last few minutes. I just want to take a look at Claude Design, which was released this week in the news. We didn't touch it on the news, but I'm gonna do a live demo, which is always sketchy because I haven't really used the tool much myself. So we're gonna see how that goes in. [48:46] Dave Pengelley: Okay? Good luck segment. I'm not loving it yet. [49:00] Dave Pengelley: Just get [49:00] Dave Pengelley: into that little beat and then it stops. I feel like [49:02] Manjula Kerai: Matrix, [49:03] Dave Pengelley: I feel, I feel like Party Parrot doing the little. [49:09] Dave Pengelley: Alright, we are going to play with Claude Design. Has, have any of you used it at all? Mano, you said you've used it, you're not loving it. Yeah, [49:15] Marno Brits: I've killed all my tokens already. Um, used it yesterday morning. [49:18] Dave Pengelley: You've killed all your tokens already. [49:20] Marno Brits: Yeah. [49:21] Dave Pengelley: Um, all right, let's. Um, I dunno how many tokens you get on it. [49:25] Dave Pengelley: Like you do get, it does limit it. It does do [49:28] Marno Brits: some SA separate token usage. So part of the same subscription, but it's a separate token completely. [49:33] Dave Pengelley: Okay. [49:33] Marno Brits: Um, and I maybe had it for 45 minutes and it was done. [49:37] Dave Pengelley: Okay. Well I barely touch it. I did try and get to do one design system earlier, but we're gonna do one for the show for AI operators. [49:43] Dave Pengelley: So I've taken the blurb off the live YouTube channel, so I've gone and grabbed that there. [49:47] Marno Brits: Mm-hmm. [49:48] Dave Pengelley: And uh, I've put out the logos and the blue node background that we have, uh, behind us in there as part of the brand. That's all I've given it. Um, and so we're gonna continue to ation 'cause I mean, we don't have a heap of branding [00:50:00] done for this particular channel. [50:01] Marno Brits: Okay. [50:02] Dave Pengelley: Five minutes. No, don't take five minutes. I don't have that time. This is why in cooking shows I say, here's one we prepared earlier. I didn't do that. I thought it would AI's so, so fast now and I'm not giving it a lot to do. Anyway, we can [50:14] Marno Brits: discuss the go to market thing that you wanted to talk about [50:16] Dave Pengelley: or, well, we, we would, we were, we were discussing that in the last bit, a little bit. [50:20] Dave Pengelley: So I'm kind of, kind of cool there. Like, it, it's good to think about and how you get in front of customers and what you do there. And it's easy to build lots of things. I'm really good at building lots of things. How do you get it out there and, you know, if we can give agents, MasterCard, maybe I could actually get an agent who's really good at marketing and, uh, advertising and can buy some ads for me. [50:37] Dave Pengelley: Maybe that's trick. I need a [50:39] Marno Brits: Yeah. [50:39] Dave Pengelley: Advertising agent. Um, because things like that, uh, outside of my wheelhouse, we talk about engineering and you need the special knowledge to be able to engineer things. When it comes to paid ads and stuff. I'm like, I don't wanna waste money buying the wrong ads or doing the wrong things. [51:00] Dave Pengelley: And so I don't buy anything. And so I do, don't do enough advertising or marketing in that sense. 'cause I'm, I'm worried about wasting money doing it wrong. So [51:00] Dave Pengelley: I need the agents that have that knowledge. But how do I know the agents have the right knowledge? 'cause I don't have the knowledge. It's that. [51:05] Dave Pengelley: Expert concept, not just a human, but an expert, um, guiding it and which, you know, a lot of designers are probably gonna say about these tools like claw design, like they're not designers. [51:17] Marno Brits: Well, that's pretty good. Like, I mean, the, the challenge I gave was trying to build a website. 'cause as you aware, I'm busy doing the rebranding into adaptive AI solutions. [51:27] Marno Brits: And I just, it gave me some cool stuff, but it's not real different to just using lovable. Like, I, I don't see the difference there at all. Or even bypass lovable, go to its core and look at the Claudes, um, and fro GitHub, they've got a front end design skills. Give that the Claude code. Same result. Like there's nothing, nothing really that unique or special source about it. [51:50] Marno Brits: Um, I would advise on the add the marketing thing, advise against again, just giving it some money and then getting it to market for you. I know, [51:58] Dave Pengelley: I know. [51:58] Marno Brits: Okay, cool. I feel [00:52:00] like, yeah, especially as we move into more ai, it's about becoming more human. Like it should be forcing us and being, getting us excited about becoming more human. [52:09] Marno Brits: So just make the batted content, like talk to people, build businesses that matter. [52:13] Dave Pengelley: The, um, the, the, the core design thing, and you're saying it's not that different to other things. Um, I think this is that example we did, we did touch on at the end of last week, and we, we need to spend more time over the next few weeks talking about harnesses and the fact that companies like Claude, the model is less of a differentiator, um, as new open source models and things come out. [52:30] Dave Pengelley: So they need to think about what are the tools they wrap around their models that make you want to use them more than anything else. Because you're right from a design skills point of view, there's tools like this one, which I've used, which is a skill that you can put into the Claude code, uh, and it really helps your AI to deliver much better looking websites than just sort of, um, it would otherwise. [53:00] Dave Pengelley: Uh, so like I, I use that skill to help build my chart reporter website and I used things like remotion [53:00] Dave Pengelley: skills in order to build these little animations, which was really cool. Um. And even static screenshots, like Remotion generated these. So I got high fidelity little screenshots rather than trying to take dodgy screenshots off my app. [53:11] Dave Pengelley: Um, but this was, you know, I got that ui ux Promax to help chart, to help Claude build this website for me. Uh, which was, which was pretty cool. [53:23] Marno Brits: I think an interesting one. Um, just making me think about Blake again. The first principles, the, the one thing that I took away from that course out of everything else is just the 80 20 rule that brings true is like, if you spend 80 time, 80% of the time planning, like sharpening your ax, you're going to get a better result. [54:00] Marno Brits: And that is something that is liberating, liberating to know, but then also a pain in the ass because especially there for the marketing, for the website, I don't wanna do more websites, I don't care about the design, just make it look pretty. But I have to spend the time writing the copy, understanding, understanding their [54:00] Marno Brits: position, the of psychology. [54:02] Marno Brits: What's the website feel like? Spend a couple hours planning instead of just trying to vibe code a website that I know I'm going to hate because I didn't put in the work. Um, that links true even in code, the like code design. So we're expecting these tools to just remove the pain points, but it still requires effort. [54:23] Amber Hills: It does. Mm-hmm. Great points mano. And, and people don't realize that. Like, they think like, oh, magic wand, let's go. You know, but you, no, you, you still need to train it and educate it and point in the right direction. Just, [54:38] Dave Pengelley: just because you've been giving Blake many shout outs, we should let people know if they want to know what, who this Blake guy is. [55:00] Dave Pengelley: Uh, go to school.com and look up Claude Code Architects and you'll see Blake there. This is a, a free school community that he has, uh, with all this content that everyone is talking about. So, um, shout out for Blake there. Mm-hmm. Go to school.com and check out Claude. [55:00] Dave Pengelley: Code architects. That is how good [55:02] Marno Brits: you've got a thousand members now. [55:03] Marno Brits: Damn. That grew quickly. Good man. [55:05] Dave Pengelley: Yep. It's obviously providing good value for people. Mm-hmm. Um, how is this going? It's added a subscribe button. It added share episode. Um, [55:16] Marno Brits: now the previous cards probably wait for that, Dave, [55:19] Dave Pengelley: sorry. [55:19] Marno Brits: What's everyone's, while we wait for that, what's everyone's favorite book at the moment? [55:23] Marno Brits: What's everyone reading? [55:25] Amber Hills: Hmm. I'm reading Diaries of the CEO. [55:27] Marno Brits: Mm-hmm. [55:28] Manjula Kerai: Oh, [55:29] Amber Hills: I like picking that up. [55:31] Marno Brits: It's a good book. Are you listening to it while reading to it or? I do you just read it on a physical [55:36] Amber Hills: copy? Yeah, read it. I [55:38] Marno Brits: just, [55:39] Amber Hills: I always pick up a book every, you know, I have a few books going, but that's the book I picked up this morning. [55:44] Marno Brits: Nice. Nice. No, it's a very good book. Um, again, fundamentals, it always comes down to fundamentals and incentives and like getting your, your buckets right, that he talks about. Um, it's like why do you do what you do and how do you make sure. Like, you don't really burn out by making sure you take [00:56:00] care of yourself. [56:00] Amber Hills: Mm-hmm. [56:01] Marno Brits: Yeah. Um, but the principles out of that book is awesome. [56:04] Amber Hills: Yeah. I like how he talks about obligation. Um, you know, you make a, a, a promise to yourself that you are going to do X, Y, Z and I think, like, if you're consistent of doing the one thing, like his thing that moved the needle was just doing content eight o'clock at night. [56:20] Amber Hills: He would just do an hour and just showing up online was the thing that made the difference of, you know, getting nowhere. Yeah. So, Dave doing ads, there's a, but it's, you know, there's enough skills and, um, experience in our community, in our AA community that there would be someone, I think someone actually even said that yesterday, that there was, uh, someone that knows someone in ads. [57:00] Amber Hills: I think Matt, it was you actually. So, I, I honestly just feel so. Blessed to be connected to so many talented [57:00] Amber Hills: individuals that, you know, with AI and our AI community, like we really don't have any, like, there's no reason for us to succeed. We just gotta, I guess, reach out to help, you know, for help and, um, and yeah, help each other out. [57:17] Marno Brits: A hundred percent. I like the, um, idea of like the PayPal mafia, if you guys are familiar with that, which is the bunch of people that got together and built awesome things. And then the other week I was showing, I was talking to my Mrs telling her about the valuation of open ai, the valuation of, um, philanthropic and put in perspective that she works for a train company. [58:00] Marno Brits: And that train company is nationwide. It's a massive, massive business, right? Like everywhere you go, you see it. And that company is evaluated at like 200 million, which is a substantial amount of money. Like, that's ridiculous. And then when I told her that open AI is at I think 830 billion, then she's like, well, that's amazing, but like, why aren't you a billionaire if that's so much money on [58:00] Marno Brits: ai? [58:00] Marno Brits: I am like, damnit. Like what? What a humbling thought of like, yeah, we've got no excuse. Like we have all the tools. It's just about like eliminating the noise, eliminating trying to keep up with everything. Just pick something that you want to sell, find a problem that you care about, own that problem, and just keep putting out content, keep putting in the work and making people aware of like, Hey, this is what I'm trying to do. [58:23] Marno Brits: Um, so trying to, yeah. Take that Steve job as approach of 20% noise and 80% signal, and then how do you find exactly that? What you said there was like, what's gonna move the needle? [58:34] Amber Hills: Yeah. [58:34] Marno Brits: What task am I doing today that's going to make me move a little bit closer to the end goal rather than me just doing busy work, like confusing movement with progress, you know? [58:45] Amber Hills: That was the comfortable analogy. Literally, kind of what you just said was removing the noise. Like, you know, it's uncomfortable and AI is kind of, even when you hold it, it's like comfortable, scary. You wouldn't have it. Like, it's just what do you do with it? You know? It's just too much. [58:59] Marno Brits: Yeah, a hundred percent.[00:59:00] [59:00] Amber Hills: But if you remove the noise, you remove the adder layer, you know, and you cut it up into little bits, it's actually really juicy inside. It's really enjoyable. So I think like, yeah, if we can just, um, yeah, just really just fine tune into one little juicy bit mm-hmm. By cutting it up and removing the noise, then happy days. [59:20] Marno Brits: I love it. What problems do each of you own, if you don't mind me asking? [59:25] Amber Hills: What problems do we solve for our [59:27] Marno Brits: customer? Yeah. So what if you are, what do you, what would your customers see as like, if they have a problem, this is the problem that they come to you, to, what does that. [59:36] Manjula Kerai: So for me it's, um, I, I, I sell time. [59:40] Manjula Kerai: Um, so with the teachers, you know, they've got the workload crisis. [59:44] Marno Brits: Mm-hmm. [59:45] Manjula Kerai: And there's just, they don't have enough time to do everything that they need to do, all the admin before they even step into the classroom. So for me it's time. I'm selling time. [59:54] Dave Pengelley: Yeah. [59:55] Amber Hills: So, and for myself, mano, so I have a, another company lead to [01:00:00] Care, which is for NDIS. [01:00:02] Amber Hills: So I've been the NDIS specialist for nearly a decade now. And so basically working out, you know, whether things aren't working, you know, um, I know basically an NDIS operations better sometimes than the director. So it's basically making sure everything's talking to each other, but more so having leads not slip away. [01:00:28] Amber Hills: I really focus on the. The marketing and sales side. Mm-hmm. Um, that customer journey. So automating that. Um, but then there's always a compliance side, but anything to do with NDIS from the finance right through to the compliance to the customer journey. I, I basically automate, tidy that up and make A-N-D-I-S provider business grow. [01:00:53] Amber Hills: Um, yeah. Increase their margins, basically. [01:00:57] Marno Brits: Fascinating. That's an awesome space to be in. Yeah. [01:01:00] Um, that's great. I, yeah, I asked the question 'cause I'm still trying to find exactly, I, I would say I sell time too, but I want to get more specific on like, what's the niche, like what's this, like, what's the thing that I care about? [01:01:12] Marno Brits: Um, for now it's, I guess it's getting back to what matters. Not, I don't have the specific word of what that is yet, but it's getting back to what matters. Working with service-based businesses, not massive businesses, just small to medium where they're tired of doing everything all the time, wearing 10 different hats, like teaching them how to use tools to make life of it easier. [01:01:37] Marno Brits: Um, whatever that looks like at this point is bloody awesome. I just need to find a specific, like one-liner or elevator pitch of I help service-based businesses go from stress to success, whatever that is. Like, you know? [01:01:51] Dave Pengelley: Mm-hmm. [01:01:51] Marno Brits: Um, but yeah, I love it. I love the, the game of just understanding businesses better, understanding how there's so many businesses that. [01:01:59] Marno Brits: They're succeeding, like they're making millions. And then like you said, Amber, like you look under the hood, you start doing the, the audit or the gap analysis, and you're like, holy crap. Like, how did you get your five Excel spreadsheets and Gmail account? But they make it succeed. They just, they keep putting in the work. [01:02:15] Marno Brits: Mm-hmm. So then upgrading them from Excel and like, um, like poor systems or lack of proper systems, giving them the right business systems and then connecting them, and then you'll, you're Sweet Ko. [01:02:27] AI VO: Yeah, [01:02:28] Manjula Kerai: it looks like, looks like the design has been completed, but the question about, uh, what are you reading? [01:02:35] Manjula Kerai: I'm reading B one of Zero, that's by Carla Murphy. [01:02:39] Marno Brits: Mm-hmm. [01:02:40] Manjula Kerai: And it's, it's about why the obsessed always wins. So, um, and so when I picked up that book, I was like, I wanna be obsessed with helping teachers. So secondary teachers, you know, that's, [01:02:51] Marno Brits: yeah. [01:02:52] Manjula Kerai: What I'm obsessed with. Okay. Uh, David, how, how did it go? [01:02:56] Dave Pengelley: Well, yeah, you guys were all deep, deep in thought. I, I didn't wanna interrupt [01:03:00] with, with, with what was going on with the designs, but while, while you were having that chat, it does look like it has come through and created a website. I didn't even say create a website. I said create a design system. Which it went through and then gave me like confirmation and I just said, yep, everything looks good. [01:03:14] Dave Pengelley: 'cause I'm just, you know, saying yes to everything at the moment. It looks good, looks good, and yep, that's good. Uh, and it's created this whole system and then created a website for us that I didn't even ask it for, which is actually pretty cool. It's on tone, it's on theme, it's used, the colors, it's used, the logos. [01:03:30] Dave Pengelley: Uh, I, I don't hate it. Like we don't actually have a proper full website for the, uh, the podcast yet, so maybe I've got a starting point now. Um, [01:03:37] Manjula Kerai: wow. Yeah, it is, it's looking really good. [01:03:41] Dave Pengelley: So that's, or design [01:03:43] Amber Hills: and then get it, get a branding kit. So get, um, just so you have a document that has all the colors, so whenever you go to build more, create more things, you can keep it consistent. [01:03:56] Dave Pengelley: Yeah. So it, it's, it's got that all in here. So it's got the read me and here's [01:04:00] my colors operator, blue sign accent, Navy stage, chrome, white, uh, font. [01:04:05] Amber Hills: Grab that and have it in a one pager. Because you'll need that one pager when you build other things. [01:04:12] Dave Pengelley: Well, given the way the AI work, right? The whole point is you give it the system. [01:04:16] Dave Pengelley: I think that's what they're, they're saying, so here's the, the read me, here's the skill that actually tells us how to use it all. Mm-hmm. And so this actually built for agents, um, not just agencies, UI kits, previews, assets like a whole box and d So when you say one page, Ram, but what do you mean that's different from this? [01:04:36] Dave Pengelley: Because this is, this is like, it's all plain text, but [01:04:39] Manjula Kerai: it's a one pager. In markdown, ambox, [01:04:42] Amber Hills: you wanna build on something else. For example, just say if another tool came out, you weren't gonna build on Claude. Mm. Then you would have that, just a one page you just chuckling to say, building this blah, blah, blah. [01:05:00] Amber Hills: It's good to, like, when I'm experimenting with different things, not that I spend much time on it, um, because I [01:05:00] Amber Hills: just, obviously Claude's just. Has the, you know, shiny things. Yeah. Um, it's good to just have that one page. I just chuck that one PDF in and say, give it the prompt. [01:05:10] Dave Pengelley: Yeah. [01:05:10] Amber Hills: And I can compare it really quickly within 10 minutes. [01:05:13] Amber Hills: Mm-hmm. Um, it just, it's like you're not giving [01:05:16] Dave Pengelley: the [01:05:16] Amber Hills: same. Yeah. [01:05:17] Dave Pengelley: Well that, that's what that, that read me is I would download that stuff off claw design and then have it so I could throw it at any ai. But while, while we, while we're discussing that in the background, I also, um, before the show got, um, Claude Sonnet to go and summarize the, all the transcripts of all the episodes so far to do an overview for a pitch deck if we wanted to try and get sponsors and advertisers for this particular show. [01:05:41] Dave Pengelley: Uh, and then I just threw the branding kit that just created, and I threw that, that sort of summary pitch thing that, uh, sauna wrote for me. Uh, and we now have a nine page deck that it just created with me, uh, for me. For pitching to get, um, [01:05:59] Manjula Kerai: [01:06:00] wonderful love that [01:06:00] Dave Pengelley: sponsors for the show. So, you know, whether it's creating websites or creating decks or other things, these are some things 'cause previously for this sort of stuff, I'd go to something like Gamma. [01:06:09] Dave Pengelley: Mm-hmm. I've been using the Gamma app, but Gamma very much likes gamma own themes and stuff. And if you haven't built your own themes and customizations Yeah. Gamma's very gammy, which doesn't fit for everyone. If you want a traditional PowerPointy style presentation, that's actually much easier and cooler to get it on brand. [01:06:27] Amber Hills: Yeah. [01:06:28] Manjula Kerai: Thank you for that. 'cause I've got a use case for that. And um, I was actually gonna use Gamma, but now I'm gonna check that one out. [01:06:35] Dave Pengelley: Yeah, so Claude, do a ai slash design new tool this week. There you go. You've seen a live, live show, not pre-prepared. Um, there we go. It's, it's, it's cool. It's got, it's got a purpose, it's got a use case. [01:07:00] Dave Pengelley: I saw Nate Kelman, um, doing some stuff with it on YouTube, doing live video edits where he is like getting, like it was moving his video across and putting up like lot dynamic text during a video thing. So, um, he was [01:07:00] Dave Pengelley: using that another tool called hyper frames. But anyway, always more things to play with than we have time. [01:07:05] Dave Pengelley: That's why, like you said, what is, what is the one thing you're spending your time on? I am guilty of being a goldfish and trying to spin all the plates. 'cause I dunno which one the money's gonna fly out of. So I'm like, I need to spin all of them versus just focusing on the one or two things and really going deep in that. [01:07:23] Dave Pengelley: So I mean that's, that's why I've spent a lot of time on chart reporter this week, getting that out and doing CPS and things like that because I think. To focus on on that beyond all the business consulting stuff, because that's a broader, longer term play. Um, again, goldfish, [01:07:37] Marno Brits: it's hard man. I mean like Alex and Mosey. [01:08:00] Marno Brits: I'll say this, then I have to head off 'cause I've got another meeting to get ready for. But, um, he's got a saying where he said all of them could work, but none of them will work unless you work on the one. Like there's so many opportunities, especially with ai. You can do voice agents, you can do text agents, you can do web graphic design, you can do business consulting, but none of them is [01:08:00] Marno Brits: going to work unless you just choose one and make that the one that works. [01:08:03] Marno Brits: Like you have full power to then choose, okay, this is gonna be the one and you just work relentlessly until it's a success and then review after six months, but at least give it six months of just pure work. [01:08:15] Manjula Kerai: And that's why the obsessed wins. Mm-hmm. Be obsessed with one thing. [01:08:19] Marno Brits: Agreed. [01:08:20] Dave Pengelley: So you mean the fact that on my other machine at the moment I've got cowork, trying to build a um, a video game for steam is probably a bad, bad plan. [01:08:28] Marno Brits: Yeah, that's not a good idea. Unless that's what you wanna do. But that's why I'm spending the past, what, yeah, probably two and a half weeks really not doing any more work. It's just doing existing clients and trying to get clear on who am I, what do I want to do for the long term, and what actually energizes me rather than it's just for a paycheck. [01:08:47] Manjula Kerai: Love that. Yeah. What your purpose. Right, [01:08:49] Marno Brits: exactly. Purpose. Yep. [01:08:51] Dave Pengelley: Brilliant. [01:08:52] Marno Brits: The incident game. [01:08:53] Dave Pengelley: Well, what a way to end. Think about your purpose, focus on that, and AI as an accelerator in helping you do that thing [01:09:00] and use it accordingly. Good news. My headache's gone. What a great show you guys. You guys cleared my headache up. [01:09:06] Dave Pengelley: Um, you, you've made my head hurt in different ways now as I think about my own personal thing says. But thank you Manjula, for joining us for the first time. Thank you for coming back, Amber, it's a pleasure to have your insights on here. Uh, thank you Australia in the world for watching this and uh, cracking chat. [01:09:22] Dave Pengelley: Really enjoyed today. We'll see you all next time. [01:09:25] Manjula Kerai: Wonderful show. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye.