Gumroad CEO's playbook to 40x his team's productivity with v0, Cursor, and Devin | Sahil Lavingia

Can you do something that used to take two weeks in two hours and that's like a 40 times speed increase? So that's kind of like the number that I have in my head generally like what's the most optimistic case if you kind of remove all the bottlenecks. Something that would take 40 hours would take 1 hour. If you're suggesting to us that AI is going to raise the bar on what's possible to do, you are certainly setting the standard. The majority of human engineering will be removing tech debt such that AI engineers can actually ship features. It's also scary, I think, which is why I think so many people shy away from this stuff. It's like there is this part of why change is uncomfortable is that change can kill you. There's like a fear of change. It's like job security, right? But at the end of the day, I think it's sort of also job insecurity. Hey everyone, welcome to How I AI, a podcast on how AI is transforming how we get things done. I'm Claire, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I have an absolute powerhouse guest, Sahil Levvenia, CEO and founder of Gumroad. If you don't know Gumroad, it's the platform that has helped creators sell over a billion dollars of products directly to their audiences. Sahil's been at the bleeding edge using AI to transform how companies build products and write code. Doing everything from open- sourcing the entire Gumroad repo to paying his employees thousands of dollars if they can write more AI powered code than he does. Today he's going to show us exactly how he does it. Let's dive in. This episode is brought to you by Enterprit. Enterprint is a customer intelligence platform used by leading CX and product orgs like Canva, Notion, Strava, Hinge, and Linear to leverage the voice of the customer and build bestin-class products. Enterpris unifies all customer conversations in real time from Gong recordings to Zenes tickets to Twitter threads and makes it available for your team for analysis. What makes Interpret unique is its ability to build and update a customerspecific knowledge graph that provides the most granular and accurate categorization of all customer feedback and connects that feedback to critical metrics like revenue and sees. If modernizing your voice of the customer program to a generational upgrade is a 2025 priority like customer ccentric industry leaders Canva, Notion, and Linear, reach out to the team at interpret.com/howia. That's e n t er p r t.com/howi ai. Hey, so I'm super excited to have you here. And before we dive into the demos, I wanted to call out something that you said a couple days ago, which is Devon, the AI engineering agent, who I also love, is writing 41% of your PRs right now, and you expect it to go to 80% by the end of the year. So, do you think that's the baseline that we should all be shooting for? Do you think you're way ahead of the curve? Where should we all be compared to that benchmark that you just set? I feel like I tell the team constantly like we have a lead you know but the lead is getting shorter and shorter every every day every week there's a new model coming out so I I would say like by the end of next year I would suspect that like every engineering team at any company is you know using cursor and devon and vzero and all these tools to ship you know a multiple times faster and the question is is mostly like can organization adapt such that those people can do so right like the bottlenecks are are show up in other places like Tony just tweeted about you know his simplify AI stuff today and I think that becomes the question is like how fast can you actually change your organization your culture especially when you're remote it's harder to make these big changes across the org to get people to learn new stuff uh to try and fail and cross share learnings you know all that all that kind of stuff okay so we're going to do it one at a time which is you're going to show us how you actually redesign or build something using these tools. So, we'll get your screen up and you can walk us through how you think about things. Awesome. Yeah. I mean, so I think the the coolest thing about all this AI stuff is that you get to spend more time doing what you really enjoy, which to me and I think you as well like like solving customer problems. And with this product that we built is called flexile and it's uh you know you can think of it like a like gustoal but built specifically for the way that we run the business which is like hiring a bunch of people a lot of project based a lot of hourly based monthly retainers all sorts of different types of people remote in person full-time let them choose their equity split uh manage your cap table all of that stuff and like the same product and one of the reasons I love AI is that I can basically just use the product and instead running into some issue and being like, "Hey, engineer, can you go solve this?" And then spending all this time like writing up a spec, you know, then putting that into, you know, sending that to a designer. That designer will then do like, you know, tomorrow or the next day will then do a a mock. There'll be some back and forth and then it'll go to like next week on Monday. It'll go to an engineer. They might have some questions that goes back to the designer and by the time it ships, you know, it makes it to production even for something like relatively trivial, you know, it's been two weeks or something, right? And so like can you do something that used to take two weeks in two hours and that's like a 40 times speed increase. So that's kind of like the number that I have in my head generally like what's like the most optimistic case if you kind of remove all the bottlenecks something that would take 40 hours would take one hour and that's pretty awesome. So even in this form like pretty simple and I built the software so I'm like you know I'm not like uh uh saying oh it's so terrible but there's always room to to to improve and even on this one screen which is the the contractor invitation age there's like already a couple things that I noticed that like aren't big enough to like really ask someone to do. Everyone's busy. They have their own stuff that they're working on. But there are like a few things that I noticed like for example the date picker is kind of terrible. Yeah. like it just uses like the you know the native date picker. It's not humanized. You know, you can't type in like next Monday or this Monday or have like a nice date picker. You know, if you go to like shad CN and this is the beauty of open source is, you know, the why AI is so good is there's a lot of open source. You get like a nice date picker like this, right? It's like nicely humanized and you can do all sorts of cool stuff. So, that's like one thing I noticed that I think is like a really good candidate for this. I would go straight to Devon. I would, you know, it's it's it doesn't really re really need that much scoping. It's kind of just like replace date widget, you know, date picker in contractor invitation screen with uh shad CN date picker. We might as well. I mean, the cool thing with Devon is you can like do that while you do other stuff. So there's there's no risk really. So I can select the flexilel repo and you know say for this specific page like update the date picker from the browser native you know input to shad import if required. I've never actually used this button, but again, this is a good example like even somebody who's using this stuff like you have to constantly like up your game to learn more, you know. Basically, I think this should be really like a a rich text like this. Like you can just type into it and you could type in like next Monday. I think resend add a cool demo like this where they have more like a natural language something like this and he could type in in one hour tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. these sorts of things. Um or Slack actually has something similar where if you go into a canvas, you know, this is our road map if you type in like Thursday, right? This is kind of like what I think would be really cool. So, I think this is also like I'm going to have Devon do multiple versions and then we can take a look at how far I got on them. But this is kind of how I would generally work is I would just take these forms and say like, you know, build this form. So, you're you're putting into V0, you know, use this form using the very descriptive great requirements. Magical though and then you're going to use V 0 to get a prototype. Yeah. So generally my flow is V 0 Devon cursor is probably how I would say it. Like generally I Vzero is my prototyping tool of choice and uh once I have like a really good prototype that I'm happy with then I I go to Devon and if Devon sort of fails to completely finish then I open it up in cursor. though I did I think last week Devon launched this pairing mode where you can actually like jump in and so I haven't really experimented with that yet but that's presumably I would use something like that going forward where I could actually just jump in and fix the changes. The nice thing is Devon actually runs, you know, one of the most annoying things about being a developer is just getting set up, you know, just getting your ad your your developer environment set up, your end variables, local host. One of the tips I have for engineering organizations that are large, which is if you can make your environment easy to set up for AI, it's probably a lot easier to set up for new hires. So it pays off to sort of use that as a testing ground for um how easy your it is for any new engineer to get started whether or not AI. So you have Vzero in theory going there it goes. Okay. So you have Vzero going on building you a prototype. I have a question here which is you know you mentioned Shad CN as your component library. Was that driven by, you know, using these AI tools and, you know, those those component libraries being out of the box or was that something you were looking at before? Yeah, it was a huge reason to switch and try to adopt a lot of these tools both. I and I think it's it's one reason that I think many people haven't really, it hasn't clicked, I guess, the AI stuff, they're like, "Oh, I tried it. It didn't really work. It's not that good. It makes a lot of mistakes. It's, you know, basically it's faster for me to do it than to have AI do it." And I found that that's like a lot of it is just like AI is good at certain things. It's really good at front end. It's really good at React. It's really good at tailwind chats and stuff. So if you're not using those sorts of tools, you're not going to get the value. Like trying to ship something like this with like rails in the back back end and like hot wire or whatnot in the front end. Like these it just doesn't exist. Like you you would have to spend all your time just getting this to work. You know, some jQuery calendar thingy thing. You know that's how Gumroad was for a long time. One of the things I wonder is if you know engineering leaders will decide on particular transitions or migrations to make just to power this stuff so that their teams can move a little bit faster because they're just seeing themselves be left so far behind. Um compared to those who are maybe using some of these these libraries and technologies natively. I I actually think that like the majority of human engineering will be removing tech debt such that AI engineers can actually ship features. Basically like designers will be shipping features because if you think about it what are they doing right they are thinking about what the feature should do and then engineers are just basically setting up the groundwork the framework the defaults the standards the linting the CI pipeline the infrastructure the dev setup such that designers actually are more and more capable over time of like basically taking their idea like if you were a designer you you know you would like just design this part you know you design this but you wouldn't design like all the little interactions in here, right? Like you would just design like like because it would just take too too long or you wouldn't even consider it because you didn't, you know, you didn't, for example, like often you'll have a designer and they like didn't consider mobile. Okay, so you got this design. Let's take a look at it. It looks pretty good. It has the magical date creation, which is type There you go. type a a magical date and it works. So it's not just the design, it's the functionality. And you said the next step for you from V 0ero is into Devon. So how does that transition work? What are you doing? You know, normally I would have a few back and forths here. You know, you could spend like three or four prompts like 10 20 minutes like really nailing like the interaction, right? You may say like, you know, added at a at a clear button or, you know, when you hit delete, it should actually delete. And this stuff will get only faster and faster and faster. But once, you know, once you're happy with what you have, normally I would take like the final prompt and I would just paste that into Devon, you know, and I would basically do similar to what I was doing before. Yep. And I can see Devon doing its thing having lots of fun and I can start a new Devon and basically do that, right? So like on here on this page and you reuse the exact same go here build this form. Yeah. Often I mean sometimes if I'm going back and forth and I learn stuff like I'm like for example this Yep. I may just add here you know like all the these are kind of like learnings where I could it's basically I'm like oh my spec could have been better. like this these are things a human engineer also would have maybe not done you know like I basically just kind of go back and forth and like build basically I'm like the the vzero is kind of clarifying my spec in a way do you use any of the code from v 0 sometimes I do like sometimes I'll take this and just use this command and if I put this and it went into cursor uh if I had cursor open on something if let's say I had it open on this for example I would just go to terminal and I would just paste this right in and it would put in this component. Uh this is for a different repo so it doesn't have chats but it would basically like you know slot that file in and then I could reference the file and and uh you can also I believe just like you know you could you could uh you could uh share it and you could literally like just give the the URL effectively right like this and you could just say like you know mimic mimic this right you know and you could say more things you know for example I noticed that like in this thing like I probably don't want the date to change in line. I like this parenthesis is kind of weird. I'd probably add like a little note, you know? So, I'd be like the putting the date in parentheses is kind of weird. Put it below the input as a note. Yeah, I love putting I don't know what this does, but for some reason I if I feel like I'm vibing with this person, like they know what I mean when I say note. I mean like slightly smaller font size like gray you know like note like I feel like a designer would get it. So you know this is kind of like what I would give uh to Devon and and then it would it would you know run off and and do its thing. It'll wake up and it'll do all these things all but all the stuff that I would basically do right open cursor get the thing find find the files that need to get changes. But I personally one of the things I think is really really important is spending more time in VZero. Like I think many people just like they do a first pass and basically I think MVPs are no longer enough. Like you can actually spend like 10 20 30 40 minutes here. If you know that Devon is going to be able to execute like sometimes you don't want to spend too much time here because it just creates work for the engineer, right? You're like oh now I have to think about this and that and this and like all these like little bits that would make the customer feel really good. Uh the user experience would go up but the developer experience would go down, right? But if you know an AI is going to be implementing all of that stuff and they're going to do it at like a very high level of conscientiousness, you might say, "Oh, by the way, redesign it to like have this or like, you know, different roles for example, right? Like different roles have different amounts show a preview in the drop down, you know?" So one may be like 200 an hour, one may be like two per project, etc. You know, one may be 250k a year. Just for fun, I might say like one may even have multiple pay rates because I've been exploring this idea generally. And I think part of the beauty of not doing it yourself is to happy accidents like AI may just take your your spec and actually do it better with it than than you would have. Uh and so yeah, that's kind of how I use it. And then I I generally if you're hosted, you know, depending on the project, uh our newer projects are all Nex.js JS host on Versell. So they'll even give you Yep. Uh like a preview branch, right? Where and I I mostly love doing front end stuff with with dev and actually now with they have this pairing thing. I could actually go in and like run rails console and like check the backend stuff too. Uh but you know with preview branches like I love making changes to antiwork.com. Yep. Because I can test them almost immediately, right? I can be like, you know, let's say a new person joined the company, you know, I can just say, hey, add this person who joined the company. This is their motto. By the way, yeah, pick a fun icon that matches for them. Like, I didn't pick any of these icons. I would not have made myself a king, for example. I just said like I basically just asked everyone in Slack like, tell me if you want it to link anywhere and what your what what you want your, you know, your your slogan to be. And then I asked Devon to actually do it and pick an icon for each person. That brings me to something I was thinking about, which is when you were in VZ and you were asking it to add on features. I was playing the product manager in my brain and I was thinking, oh, in past lives, people would say, "No, that's scope creep. We're just focused on the date picker or we're just focused on updating this component. We can't kind of scope creep and add more and more features." And what I think I think is interesting. I'm curious your point of view is you can really start to go to the edges of some great user experience and it's less about how much time will this take or is it too complicated. It's more about what's actually going to work and be be useful. Yeah, totally. And like I often like I mean maybe this annoys some people at the company but like as I'm doing Vzero stuff like on other things I'll be I'll like go into the issue and be like let's see if I have one here like I wanted to improve the multiple pay rates per role as I mentioned right like this is and I I'll you know I'll be like I'll just go in here and be like you know like this one I had I was like doing something with gusto and I kind of liked it you know and I was like did I turn on this and it's just free. People could ignore it if they want, but it's like free design research, you know. Uh, so all of a sudden they have an example of this. This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Building a business achieving ISO 4201 compliance shows your customers that you're taking the necessary steps to ensure responsible usage and development of AI. But the process can be timeconuming, tedious, and very expensive. With Vanta, achieving compliance can be done in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost. 95% of the required document templates are pre-built for you, accelerating the process, helping you demonstrate trustworthy AI practices and scale your business. Start with Vant's free ISO 4201 checklist, which gives you a breakdown of the compliance process and the road ahead. Download it at vanta.com/howi. That's v a nta.com/howi aai for the free compliance for AI checklist. You know, I see you as an individual being able to add this and fix that and update, you know, the the homepage and all those things and use Devon sort of asynchronously. I'm curious how you've made this work at the team level. Like what are the actual operational pieces that have to be in place for this to not degrade into chaos? And then what about just culture makes this work for you all? Yeah, I mean first off it's not easy. Change is uncomfortable, right? Uh it requires work and energy and biologically I feel like we're trying to save our energy all the time. So you have to, you know, you have to motivate people. You have to make it exciting. You know, there's a reason like colleges and classes are in person, right? Like there's a it's like fun to train together. You know, it's easier to go to the gym in a gym than like at home in your bedroom, right? Part of it is doing it myself, too. You know, like if your manager, your annoying boss is telling you to do something, it's different than like leading from the front a little bit. I often do like screen shares actually. Like I recorded these videos and I recorded this one with Josh Pigford on YouTube, which is like 3 hours long. And I basically did it because I wanted to I was like, this is, you know, got a lot of views actually. Like I I Yeah, that's how important I felt it was. Not just for me but for everybody but I was I basically recorded it for the team. I had my team in mind as I was doing it like check out how cool it is like imagine once we switched to Tailwind like how fast we can you know do this kind of thing and like how you know it sort of is part of that bringing the energy. We also financially motivated people. So there was a couple times here I'll find you example of a Devon competition we did. So, we did this competition where we did 30 uh $33,000 uh split amongst whomever opens and merges more Devon PRs than me over the course of May. So, you know, it's a kind of a fun way to like motivate people to learn. It's time bound. Uh and I actually did pretty well. Let's see the results. So, I got I got fourth. I opened uh 27 PRs with Devon and then three people beat me. So it's uh and I you know I do a lot of easy wins you know so like props to all the engineers who who who did it but yeah I this is all my all my Devon PRs. A lot of people are like there's no way you use Devon like you're making it up. You're just trying to like go viral or whatever. I'm like not really like I'm just trying to like help people be more productive. I didn't know that was so controversial. But you know there's like a lot of small things like remove this part of the homepage. there's this like recap that we do in Slack that's generated by AI uh that recaps like everything that shipped last week. And so I said, "Hey Devon, could you, you know, like for example, these two things don't really need to be here because there's nothing under them, right?" So I just said, "Hey at Devon, like could you like, you know, only show the products that actually have shipments and like hide the other ones." And also like some of these aren't really shipments. Like this one is only the back end. The front end hasn't shipped yet. to like make sure you know the pro update the AI prompt that we're using for this which by the way I've never seen like I I just I just know that there's an AI prompt that's you know involved and you know it'll and that's actually what this uh what this one is right so it found the Slack weekly you know recap and it it uh you know it it it made these changes and it created this PR so we can actually go in and see this PR and we can uh confirm my my suspicion or not which is oh turns out there is a prompt focus primarily on shipments, feature improvements and bug fixes, right? prioritize these categories and then it also did something here uh which is if we looked it did this it added a filter so you know basically only the projects that have more than one the thing that I would critique about myself is that ideally we would have a test and maybe there is a test that I don't know about so this is when the human would come in I don't normally just hit merge on these things you know I would normally send this to somebody else and be like hey I did my best shot at this and you you'd see here for the Slack recap. Don't include product names. And then I I pasted uh pasted this um the link to the to the update. You know, I would normally like say, hey, you make sure this looks good to you and if there are any tests that need updating. And personally, I think this is way better that like someone has done most of the work for you. And basically, I think humans will start the process. I think of it like flying a plane. like humans will take off, decide where to go and land typically you know do QA in the in this context but you know not actually build uh write all this code right like look up like for example you know like filter versus trim or dot clean or you know like every language is different right but overall I know rough amount of software architecture that like this is you know this is the right solution right to this problem you're just adding a simple filter that removes the things and ideally there would be a test so I would have even higher confidence that that this uh that this has done what it what it should. You know, one thing I was going to call out on the code you just wrote showed was I find that these AI engineering tools are pretty good engineering citizens and that their code is well commented. They call out you know there's little bit document dock strings and things like that that make it easier to parse some of those those changes. Okay. So, this is what we kicked off with. It's the native date picker replaced with the Shad CN one. Yeah. So, the core problem I have here, which I guess uh is I need to make sure it works. Okay. So, you're showing the time lapse of Devon here, which is basically a screen recording of every single step along the way. Right now you're in the in the terminal and the IDE. So you can actually replay step by step how Devon got all this code done. It looks like it has in here, you know, reasoning and thought and planning. Exactly. And then the part that I'm looking for and hopefully it did it is that it would run it would run the app locally. And it often does this, but sometimes if you have a complex app and we just open source this so that it may have like broken. Uh, but it would actually run the browser in its little local box and then it would test it. So, let me ask it to do that. Run the browser and it's awake. So, it should pretty quickly start doing doing that. And it's this is Devon right here. Devon box. Mr. Devon. Uh, and also we can watch it on this one, right? It's uh it's doing its its little thing. So because I used magical it in quotes it presumed that I wanted to call it magical and you can see we actually open sourced it recently. So it's it's working on an old repo which is my guess of why it's not working exactly right. Um, so now there are two things I decided. So, you know, replace this input, the standard input with the type date with this new component. That's definitely correct and then it uh created this uh this component where it goes through and it it it uh replaces it. So, the thing that looks wrong here is it doesn't feel it doesn't look like there's any AI magic. So, some it's sort of making which maybe it doesn't need to. Maybe it's smart enough to know if I just type in today, tomorrow, or yesterday. But, you know, it this probably wouldn't work if I said like three Sundays from now. But maybe that's fine. Maybe that's not actually what anyone would would really do. This maybe even as a good example is something that to your point like I think AI has really good hygiene, engineer hygiene where it is on a on a micro level like it's a better engineer than human engineer would be. So you have to spend more time on like the architecture and like the planning aspect of it. Making sure your execution is correct. Like calling it magical date picker maybe is not the correct approach. I would probably call it natural language date picker or something like that because magical doesn't really give you any insight into what's magical about it. Uh but besides that, my guess is like this code, this parse natural language uh is actually like probably really really robust, really good. Uh even this magical look like check out the math on this guy, you know, like whoa, pretty simple, but like how long would it you know how many times would you have to tweak it to like oh I you know like I got it wrong this like fancy ad days function like it's pretty uh pretty clever how it's doing how it's doing that find index it's getting all you know it's basically figuring out like when you type next Monday it's like three days and you're adding the days to get to the right right day in the calendar and it's parsing the database and it's like that's like this would be like a you know two years ago this would be like a so impressive for like this would be almost like an engineering challenge you know like I would hire an engineer based on this which is now they would just go to chat GPT and be like and yeah it would it would it would work so what you could do is to go back to the v 0ero if you really wanted to enhance this you know you could just sort of take this component and they're actually working on a way to like embed a you know bring a component back into v and then you could like iterate on and the UX like a designer could even do that with Vzero and then you could then pull it back in uh to the codebase. So you could kind of like do a lot of this like customer focus iteration you know uh on the u in a wizzywig way basically like dreamw weaver you know uh versus like like in code I mean like this you have to think so hard to understand like what how do you improve the user experience looking at this right the amount of like brain power and it just hurts my head what I think about is imagine that an engineer took this and went a week away and came back and said, "Here, I built your magical natural language, you know, date picker and you said, "No, that's not really what I want." It feels like such an expensive iteration to throw out that code and do something new. Whereas you you can iterate that on that, you know, in a couple minutes or a couple hours over and over and not feel like you're wasting, you know, time and expense and people's honestly people's like motivation and energy. I think about that a lot as well. Yeah. Yeah, if you if you spend two weeks on something and you're, you know, you're annoying CEO, it's like, nope, that's not what I meant. It's like, you know, and then you got to spend you got to go for a long walk in a coffee bag before you're back to work, right? So, uh, it's so much better to like really spend time, you know, here before I just leaned in. So, we got a redesign from Vzero on this new employee in onboarding. And not only did it get new features, but you got a beautiful update on the um date picker with some suggested common time frames in there. Yeah, this is super smart. Like, and all I did, by the way, I just said build a really dope natural language day picker for an HR product onboarding form. So, probably the critical piece is like HR, right? So it's like building it in the context of the problem you're trying to solve which is you know if you're if you're if you're building like a like a party planning tool you probably have like Christmas or you know like whatever what you know but in this case uh yeah next Monday in two weeks you know probably it's going to be next Monday that's my guess is that is the most common you know but you could say actually we're you know we're we're based in you know a country in which like we work weeks start on Sundays or Tuesdays and boom, you know, and you could do all sorts of interesting things or we're in a, you know, a place in which our date, you know, we put the day before the month or whatever. And so, yeah, just uh it just uh yeah, just a great opportunity to like really push the envelope and just like really spend more time. Even I love this. I put the first name and last name next to each other so you can read it out nicely. So, we just watched you ship in a new component, build a magical and now dope date picker for your employee onboarding tool. You showed us how to get this done across your org and you prove that you're at least in the top five people shipping PRs with DMB or with Devon at at the company. Oh, by the way, this is merged. We got it merged. So it looks like uh looks like it made no mistakes. So yeah, next week it'll be better. Like think about that would have been like you know at least 24 hours. So that's like a nice 10x speed increase. This is a lot about engineering at Gumroad and you said you know 41% of your peers are being written by Devon. You're writing code. You who what org is AI coming for next where the 80% of the work you think is going to be started by agents? I mean I think you could see you know if you think about what are the orgs that exist you know it's like design product engineering customer support sales marketing and I really I don't know I actually was probably more optimistic on like full automation I don't think we're going to really get there for a long time there's just always like a higher level abstraction that you get to operate at so you know there will be for example like I think there's a lot more marketing automation that could happen in terms of like suggested tweets like you know it could just watch what's happening in GitHub it could like suggest Hey, this thing we you know we have a a a content framework we should post about this feature right right now I noticed myself having to like you know say hey this thing shipped in GitHub by the way only half of it shipped only the back end there's still all this nuance that I think you know marketing could get like a lot more efficient sales too I think like for example there are all these people who sign up you know they show up in our database basically right uh and they're just emails right you go to flexile you sign up but there's I think a lot more automation. You know, if someone signs up to Flexile with flexile and your times.com, you know, you could sort of queue up an email to them. There's so much focus on customer support. We even built our own customer support product with AI, which is great. You know, you can you can talk to AI and it'll help you out. But this is all like reactive, you know. Well, what if I'm just browsing the page and, you know, it it knows that I'm in New York for my IP, you know, and you can wave at me and, you know, it could be like, "Hey, what's up? How's New York? It's kind of cold out there. It's kind of rainy, you know, and you be like, "Oh, yeah, it is it is rainy in New York. Why do you care?" And you could have a conversation and, you know, be like, "Well, you know, it's kind of nice to be able to like talk about the problems customers are facing." So, yeah. I mean there's there's I think sales like making it more making support more about sales, making it more proactive. I think making design more about product, making engineering more about architecture, you know, I think there's always going to be more and more stuff to do. May maybe even like like like prioritization. I think I spend a lot of my time like you know for example like going through GitHub and saying okay we have all these tasks we have like 27 things like what do we build first? And right now it's like in my head. Basically I've seen all these things go live or maybe even a better example more people would relate to would be Gumroad. You know we have this big road map and you know I basically I think I'm pretty good at this but the reason I'm good at this is because I've seen every single thing ship and so I kind of can very quickly sort of be like okay this is this is you know going to generate like you know maybe a hundred to $200,000 in value for creators creator earnings. this will probably generate like 300 400k but then I have to also put on my engineering hat and say okay this is going to take like 40 hours of an engineer's time this is going to take 300 hours of an you know and like do all this math which you can go to business school and learn about bite and like all these things and I could totally imagine like you know a button here that's like magical rank right and then it just like sort of goes through and maybe you you should actually know that like because you you missed out this fact it's actually much harder to ship or we don't yet use chats to the end. So actually you're underestimating this and it could like rep prioritize it, right? And you could do all sorts of interesting things. That's like a huge I mean think about how many people at these large companies especially like they're spending so much of their time on strategy quoteunquote which is really just prioritization, right? And what we do is we just email all creators and we just put together a list of things and I just we just sent this Google doc to like our top 200 creators in 2024 and we kind of like ranked this based on what they wanted from us because it turns out like they're the ones paying our bills, right? And we started shipping it and imagine AI could take all it in all that data. I mean all their sales volume we have access to right in our database and you could somehow kind of like get a good good sense of like okay what what feedback should we be listening to and you know you could imagine like you just hit a button that says like you know assign to Devon you know and then boom it's done I mean that's another weird thing though right is like well if if AI gets so good why do you need to just do everything why why what's the point of prioritization prioritization is a function of like limited resources So that's a whole thing. It's like I I really I mean I would love to be in a place where I come to the office and I have no idea what's going to happen. Like I have no idea what we should even be building and we spend time as a team like thinking about like what should we build? Like we go like there's no there's no issues in in Git. Cleared. Yep. Like because every issue is is solved. So you know it's cleared. We're inbox zero. And so it's like okay well what do we do? And then we just sit around and talk and pontificate and eat lunch and you know we really have to think hard about like oh we should do something totally radical like open source the whole thing you know like things that like an AI probably wouldn't suggest that it wouldn't be in the in the next token prediction or even in the reasoning models or like okay we should do really advanced content customization options okay like what what is that okay let's go design and voter that and do a lot of research you know I think research is obviously going to get a lot better with with AI, but but still humans have to go talk to people, ask them questions, user research, design research, um market research. Um I think sales will always be important. I think marketing like I think marketing will be one of those things where like the average marketing like AI will get so good at marketing that like the level of what's interesting to a human like kind of like you know that meme of the Saratoga Springs guy drinking the water and whatever obviously like putting banana on his face like to me that's like a sign of how good AI is that like that level of content production is now necessary to go viral like it's insane. I can't imagine like how long that video took to make it just it's it's so funny. Like it's so thoughtful and so many funny different little like Easter eggs, you know? And I think that like that's kind of what will need to happen. It's just like you have to like up the game more and more and more. Like you know, right now artists can post like a painting on Instagram and people will be like, "Oh, amazing painting." But like in 5 years it's going to be like you need to like post the freaking movie. It's like that's just what people will expect. Like hey, we just want to see your like 30-minute sci-fi movie that you did. And that's just like for free. Sorry. It's just like that's what that's what our dop you know that's what's happened to our our our dopamine system. Or we can spend like a whole day talking about like how do we get better at recommending products on Gumroad. Is there a totally different kind of you know recommendation experience that's like much more AIdriven and much more natural language than just like a marketplace of you know feed of products where you can it can remember things about your your tastes your preferences you know it can learn from you. We're launching a community feature. pretty excited about this next uh later this week which is pretty big but we you know there's just tons of yeah I mean who knows I mean it's exciting it's also scary I think which is why I think so many people shy away from this stuff is like there is this like part of part of why change is uncomfortable is that like change can kill you you know like there's like a fear of change like you know it's it's like job security right but at the end of the day I think it's sort of also job insecurity like we don't know if like what we do will continue to be valuable I can say For sure. If you're if you're suggesting to us that AI is going to raise the bar on what's possible to do, you're certainly setting the standard. I think you're showing an entirely new way for teams to build. You're showing an entire way for a leader to show up and actually contribute to the work product of the company, which I think is really inspirational. And then I think you're also showing, look, you just have to go learn these things and try things. and you know, you're going to get in a loop, but over time, you can actually become one of these leaders that's that's on the leading edge as opposed to the lagging edge. So, I I think it's great and I think you're setting the standard for how EPD orgs are going to operate in the future, if not if not companies. So, we're going to we're going to wrap up with a quick lightning round. Two questions. If you could encourage people to learn just one of all all your toys here you just showed just one that you think is the highest impact which one would it be? Vzero. Honestly that's a bias I think cuz I spend so much time in product. I think if I'm more of an engineer I think cursor agent mode is pretty crazy. I think if you're like a CEO of a company I think Devon is like the most impressive. Like the fact that you can just be in Slack and just talk to it and it will it will do this is crazy. So I think a lot of it depends on like your role in you know what you value and what you think is the most important but vzero I think it's just like the lowest hanging fruit. I think everyone is kind of familiar with Figma and I think a lot of people think that like you know okay now people no one questions that AI can code even though a year ago people were like say oh he can't code or whatever but now people are like oh he can't design it doesn't have taste you know and so it's just like really you know like design a really nice onboarding wizard for a bank you know and like watch it do a better UI for a bank than any bank has you know so I think that this is like something just anyone can do a kid could like have fun with this. So I would say yeah I probably dominate V 0ero and then you know the cool thing about V 0 is it shows you what's possible and so then if you want to execute on it then you have to like learn all the other all the other tools. Uh the other nice thing about Vzero is that it comes with a URL. So you could build like a tic-tac-toe and send it to your friend and play tic-tac-toe which is a kind of a nice you know replet or bolt new or lovable like they there there's just so many. We've talked a lot about how you are setting up incentives like bounties to get people to use AI or learn AI, but how do you get AI to do what you want? So, I found that everybody has their own tactic. Like, they're mean, they offer money. What is your strategy for getting AI to listen to you when it's in a little bit of a loop? I mean, honestly, capital letters. Not in like a mean way. Hopefully. Hopefully it doesn't take it the wrong way, but I just think it's like it is, you know, kind of like it's kind of old school, I guess. You know, you have like literally like lowerase and uppercase and like it's just a really easy way of saying like this part is really important. Like please do not ignore this specific part. There's another hack that I love called etc. So if you want a list of things, you you can name like two of them and then just say etc. and it will often like riff. It's really fun to just like be like it's kind of like a test, you know? It's like you've come up with two or three, but you need 10. It's it's kind of a nice way of letting letting it like be more more creative. So, well, this has been incredible and we have to wrap by showing you have not only redesigned your own product, but you've taken on the baking industry by generating a onboarding for a neo bank apparently here uh in in V0. I really appreciate you giving us a real look at how you're building with AI, both as an individual, as a and as a team. I think you're definitely going to inspire tons of people to rethink how they show up at work. And I think a few folks are going to be looking over their shoulder thinking that you're about to lap them once or twice on some of on some of this building. So, thank you so much for the time. Where can people find you and how can they be helpful to you? Yeah, you can find me on on on Twitterx. Uh my handle is at SHL. Uh and helpful. I don't know. Just uh anytime you see something I've said that you disagree with or think of my thoughts could be improved upon, just uh reply, let me know, DM me. I'm always looking to uh get feedback and uh improve my improve my thinking. So yeah, I just appreciate everyone tuning in and I excited to see what everyone builds. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.