Breakeven Brothers

Bennett (00:16)
Alrighty, we are back with a brand new season, season two of the Breakeven Brothers podcast.

Bradley Bernard (00:21)
So back.

Bennett (00:22)
That's right. Yeah, we took a little hiatus. I think it was around two months or so. we had some travel planned, we had some just

Bradley Bernard (00:28)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (00:29)
busy life stuff going on. So while

Bradley Bernard (00:31)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (00:32)
we were gone, lots and lots of AI stuff has, of course, taken place. So excited to get back in front of people and start recording again. So, how's it going, Brad?

Bradley Bernard (00:42)
It's going great. came back from a two week stint in Europe for a friend's wedding. So did Copenhagen for the first time, had amazing food there. Everything was like a tasting menu. that that was excellent. Did a little boat tour as well, colorful buildings and nice people, but definitely quite expensive over there. And the one thing we did see when we're out there was the boat that Marcus went on, if you've watched the bear. So he does a little stint in Copenhagen, for I think

Bradley Bernard (01:10)
Being a pastry chef and along the kind of like narrow canals, there's one boat that he was on. So I walked past that boat, got a little video clip, and was like, I was here. and then after that, went to Cannes in France, saw this amazing castle wedding that I was a part of. Honestly the best wedding I've ever been to, which super crazy, super fun, amazing. And then after that, did a few days in Barcelona and nearby areas. So did the whole

Bradley Bernard (01:37)
Europe sprint was super hot, jumped through Airbnbs and hotels, but honestly, an excellent time off was able to completely disconnect from work, not do anything. It's the longest time I've been without my laptop in a long time. What I did before I left, which probably wasn't ideal, but I had set up my computer to be connected to a charger and locked, so I could do like codex remote, because you can do that now. But I think it dropped connection after like one day.

Bradley Bernard (02:03)
So for whatever reason it didn't work out and I thought, you know, maybe that's for the better. so yeah, I got back last week on on Sunday night and then did work the next Monday and I was just dead and jet lagged, but it was kind of nice. I'm slowly getting back to the normal schedule where I wake up at like eight instead of six AM and I sleep at midnight instead of ten PM. So finally back and ready. But yeah, it was a great reset.

Bennett (02:27)
Nice, nice. That's awesome. well, if it's your first time listening to us, I guess we should do a quick introduction, Brad. so I'll go ahead

Bradley Bernard (02:33)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (02:33)
and kick it off. My name's Bennett, of course. I'm traditionally an accountant and CPA, but just have a passion for technology. And so in twenty twenty six, that means of course AI. And so, love trying to make things with AI, learning what AI can kind of do, not just for accounting, but just in just in terms of knowledge work in general. and so yeah, it's a little bit about me. Brad, turn it over to you.

Bradley Bernard (02:54)
Yeah, I've been building apps for about ten years now. started a PayPal, went through a bunch of different companies. Always had a passion for building things, even in high school and college. So yeah, software engineer by trade, working on the iOS side, but full stack developer interested in Lairville on the PHP side. I know that's kind of a hot take. big gamer. So yeah, just building stuff in public. And I'm on Twitter, on YouTube, have an awesome documentary there. And yeah, just trying to build cool stuff. I think half the time is

Bradley Bernard (03:23)
Learning coding, but with AI it's kind of less learning the coding part, more shipping good products. So definitely drop a follow on X. I'm trying to post a bit more there. also on LinkedIn and YouTube. So yeah. For first time listeners, welcome. We have quite a footprint. You have about forty episodes to catch up on, but we're happy to have you.

Bennett (03:42)
Cool. Awesome. All righty. So after being gone for two months or so, there's a ton of things we could catch up on and we can't do it all

Bradley Bernard (03:48)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (03:48)
in one episode. So where should we start, Brad? You want to start with your item or should I jump right into mine? What are you thinking?

Bradley Bernard (03:54)
I I've been having I'll jump into mine. I've been having a lot of fun with Chat GPT finances. this has been a feature that's kind of been in development for a long time. I think it came out probably a month or two ago for Chat GPT Pro users, which for those who aren't aware, that is the two hundred dollar a month plan. Definitely not the the cheapest plan and for everybody, but technically finances was out for them. I think a week or two ago it came out for plus users, a twenty dollar a month subscription.

Bradley Bernard (04:22)
so I had waited until it became more broadly available. I tried it out last week and I loved it. So you open up the ChatGPT mobile app, you link your accounts using Plaid, which is kind of the de facto standard for authenticating banks and credit cards and not, you know, giving risky control. Plaid does a really good job of isolating your logins and doing official like chase OAuth logins. Once you get past that part and you add all your accounts, it's pretty smooth sailing. So it pulls in

Bradley Bernard (04:51)
Your credit card expenses, your bank account transactions, any like, you know, mutual funds or stocks that you own on like Robinhood or other platforms. So it really has a holistic view of all of your investments, your cash, your debt, et cetera. I let that bake for a day or so to pull in data. And then I started asking queries about it. And the good part about it is that it pre prompts you with queries to save money to audit your spending. So sometimes it's a little bit of a blank slate problem.

Bradley Bernard (05:17)
And I'm like, I don't really know what I want to do with this feature. It feels nice to have full visibility, but I asked, like, hey, how can I reduce my business spending? And it went through and said, Hey, you spend this much money a month and per year on like VuxBite and business expenses. Here's how you could reduce a few with overlap. And I thought, you know, it identified one or two that I could probably cancel. one of them actually being Whisper Flow. So I love Whisperflow. however, the Codex app does have good voice mode. so I actually canceled that two days ago.

Bradley Bernard (05:46)
big shout out to them. They created great software, but I feel like that might become a commodity. I don't know. but other cool

Bennett (05:51)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (05:52)
stuff with finances, you get great charts, great visuals, great identification of subscriptions. So it shows you what's upcoming and what you've already paid for and like what cards that's associated with. And what I really liked is it has memories. So Chat GPT has kind of revolutionized memories. There used to be a very simple like list of facts. I think this was like memories v two. Kinda sucked, wasn't great.

Bradley Bernard (06:16)
memories like V3, I think they coined it like a dreaming mode where you learn things over time after chats and you kind of forget old things just like a normal human brain. And so Chat GPT Finances has its own memory mode. So you could chat with it about your goals and finance, and it'll remember that and take that through other conversations. So I was really impressed. I think everyone, if you're a paying user, should sign up. And I know people are kind of

Bradley Bernard (06:42)
Don't love giving all your data, but if you're okay with that, I think it is really fun to talk shop about how to optimize finances 'cause there's a long kind of tail of things you could do there.

Bennett (06:53)
Yeah. I I don't use it but I did see the announcement and it kind of made sense to do 'cause a lot of times I was like exporting like bank details and just putting it

Bradley Bernard (07:02)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (07:03)
in Excel, then basically just giving it to Chat GPT or or Codex really and and it would just, you know, run a bunch of Python scripts and understand the data, then kinda do exactly what, you know, I was asking it to, kinda like you said with like the pre prompts and stuff. I use Monarch money for like my budgeting stuff. yeah, yeah. But

Bradley Bernard (07:18)
okay. I do know that one.

Bennett (07:20)
Yeah. And like I'm it's interesting. I'm in the camp right now where it's like I don't want all my stuff within one vendor on anything. You know, like I feel like there's some just benefit to having things spread out a little bit. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's just my personal thought right now. But I do like it a lot, especially for like I can see it being super successful with like small business owners where like instead of having to use QuickBooks, can you just, you know, use some kind of like, you know, Chat GPT finances,

Bradley Bernard (07:46)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (07:47)
but have it be a little bit more catered to like

Bennett (07:49)
you know, business. I don't I'm not sure if that's part of it. I think right now it seems like it's more of a personal finance target audience. But I I loathe QuickBooks and so I'm happy to see anything that eats into that market share. And I could see something like this for like again small businesses, simple, you know, maybe like single member LLCs, sole proprietorships,

Bradley Bernard (08:06)
Yeah.

Bennett (08:07)
if there's a way to kind of like help with that instead of using QuickBooks because QuickBooks will try and push its own AI. I think it has some kind of licensing agreement with one of the frontier companies, but like

Bennett (08:19)
It just it's it's QuickBooks is just a legacy dinosaur product that just keeps getting bolted on and bolted on and bolted on and it's just not that good and accountants don't like it. So yeah.

Bradley Bernard (08:27)
Yeah. Yeah, I

Bradley Bernard (08:29)
agree. I I think it's quite nice. Like I had built the Empower C L I C P and hooked that up within Codec so it could like query and do all that. Like pull my data from Empower, which was another aggregator that didn't use plaid. It was kind of closer to mint.

Bennett (08:43)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (08:43)
But it just I don't know, I didn't have like these top tier models hooked up. It didn't feel as rich. Like Chat GPT finances can render you charts and widgets and categorize your spending. All these things that if you have the raw transaction data, it's not

Bradley Bernard (08:57)
doesn't do as much there. So yeah, I would highly recommend it. I even set up an automation, which is suggested in the in Chat GBT mobile app where you talk about your finances and then at the end it's like, hey, do this weekly. Like take a snapshot of what I've spent this week and compare it to last week and look at like the overall trends and suggest me ways to do better. And I thought that was freaking awesome because there's certain high value ads. Like once you get your finances data in there, it feels super high value and the experience is really good.

Bradley Bernard (09:25)
And you kind of build up this repetition over time to like check your finances. Like it's way easier to have a consolidated view and like AI on top and a memory. Like when I use these other tools like Empower, I have to go manually scan from last time to this time and you know, do all this just manual work. But if there's an intelligent, you know, PhD level reasoner behind the scenes that's able to say, like, I know what you want. Here's the last snapshot, here's the current snapshot. Give me something reasonable much quicker. So I think that part is like.

Bradley Bernard (09:54)
Super smooth experience. if you're a plus user, definitely try it out. Only in the US for now, probably expanding, not not a hundred percent sure there, but seems very early for this feature and a quick win to try out if you're curious.

Bennett (10:07)
Yeah. Well, I think too, the other part of that's nice is, and I think this is what people were using, and certainly in my case, using chat GPT four is almost like kind of like a coach or like a like kind of like an advisor with when it comes to that kind of stuff. So it's like it's one thing to see your data and like understand where you're spending money, but then to have someone and you know, quote unquote an AI model, it's not really a person, but you know, have someone kind of talk you through your goals and like tell you if you're, you know, tracking to what you want or if this is like

Bennett (10:36)
You know, something that is the opposite of what you want. Right. And so like I think there's a helpful accountability loop that you can kind of create with something like this where you connect your finances where you're not just understanding your spending and your income, but then also like some someone can kind of tell you, hey, like you're on the right track for the goals that you made earlier this year and s or something like

Bradley Bernard (10:56)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (10:56)
that. So I think that's a big cause it's like, you with NBA players too, you know, in like sports, it's like

Bennett (11:02)
You know, a coach, sometimes people say like, coaches aren't that necessary 'cause like the basketball players know how to play and they know the positions and all that kind of stuff. But like I feel like a good coach is someone who can like take a step back and like see big picture and kind of like, you know, adjust if you need like tweaking here or tweaking there. And so I think with finances it's a kind of a similar thing where it's like, yeah, everyone knows you should save a lot of money, you know, you should not spend frivolously. Like everyone kind of knows these kind of just rules and like and chains of thought with like finances, but

Bennett (11:32)
To have like someone kind of again coach or be like kind of like an accountability partner, I think is valuable. And I think that's something that hopefully if you can connect your, you know, finances with Chat GPT, like you can use it in that way and not just like, hey, this is my data. Like how is it tell me how it's kind of tracking to what I want to do long term with like my goals using the memories that you kind of mentioned earlier. It's like,

Bradley Bernard (11:54)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (11:54)
hey, you told me back in January that you wanted to, you know, buy your first house or whatever. Like

Bennett (12:00)
if you're spending this much money on Starbucks, then you're not tracking to that goal. You know, like just kinda having

Bradley Bernard (12:04)
Yeah.

Bennett (12:04)
that feedback loop I think is great too.

Bradley Bernard (12:06)
Yeah, it doesn't have budgeting built in, but it has categories that you can modify. So that monarch bit or budgeting bit, I don't know, maybe will come. Not sure what the team's working on. the other one is the the memories that are from your normal chat GPT are kind of brought into finances. So I think there's a subset of memories in finances, and then your overall profile has memory. So it did reference things that I had talked about in other chats in the finances chat. And I was like, this is kind of nice. Like it felt

Bradley Bernard (12:34)
Felt like it knew me already, which I was like, that is freaking awesome. So yeah, super cool software, a great experience. The automations for it make it super high value. And I'll report back in a few months of like what I've done and and where it's, you know, saving me money. Cause I think at the end of the day, yeah, getting someone who is on top of your finances in a digestible way in a good experience is like the best thing that I want. That's that's the end goal for a lot of the software for me. And I I think finances does a pretty good job getting me there.

Bennett (13:01)
Yeah. And I think it's like, you know, I I believe in expertise and there's value in expertise and you know, I think it doesn't replace financial advisors. I don't think and I feel the same way for like, you know, good CPAs and stuff, but I think it's a very helpful kind of just first layer of review and kind of just bounce ideas off of and stuff like that. So like I think there's a

Bradley Bernard (13:20)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (13:20)
place still for like expertise,

Bennett (13:22)
but like I think again it just makes it easier kind of have a better holistic view of your finances, you know. So I think that's pretty cool.

Bradley Bernard (13:28)
Yeah, my my last

Bradley Bernard (13:29)
anecdote here before we move on is when I did my initial audit, like post linking all of your accounts, it highlighted that I had a I think it was like a eight hundred dollar American Express fee. And it was like, Hey, this fee is huge. Like, are you sure you want this credit card? And then I told it, No, no, no, like I do my best. Use all the American Express benefits, like go add those up, which some benefits are like

Bradley Bernard (13:53)
$15 a month on Uber, which aren't really tracked within transactions that's like within the Uber app. but it did kind of comb through a lot of the refunds that AMX gives you if you spend in certain areas for the credit card benefits. And it tallied those up and was like, you spend, you know, 800 or 900 on the credit card yearly fee, but you use like $800 of the benefits that are refunds. Plus, if you add $300 of Uber credit, you're like already over what the annual fee would be. And so it was nice for it to flag it.

Bradley Bernard (14:21)
And was nice for me to challenge it and it kind of agreed with me. And I think the models have a long history of like being agreeable. But this one I was like, No, no, no, I'm pretty sure I'm right here and it's getting better. And I think it'll probably learn that as a memory of like, Hey, I use the benefits for the card, but also challenge me and make sure I am using it. So it was nice for it to call that out because I think you can forget about these things from time to time and it highlighting it is just like, that is front and center, and like it is a egregiously expensive card, but if you use it correctly, you can get the benefit out of it. So

Bennett (14:50)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (14:50)
shout out to finances for that.

Bennett (14:52)
Well, and that reminds me of something I did recently where it wasn't connected to the finance plugin, but I have the render, I use render for some of my websites and apps and stuff. And I was had it connected with like the codex plugin. And I kinda asked it, I was like, Hey, I think I'm spending way too much money on like the way that these sites are set up. Like some of them are static pages, some of them are actual web apps.

Bennett (15:14)
And I was like, just look at my projects and tell me, like, am I overpaying and like what a better alternative is? And

Bradley Bernard (15:19)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (15:20)
yeah, it managed to save me like probably like 70 bucks, which again is probably a skill

Bradley Bernard (15:23)
Wow.

Bennett (15:24)
issue. Yeah, it was probably a skill issue because I didn't, you know, I just set it up and just kind of click through some of the render setup pages and probably should have slowed down and just been like, Do I really need this thing for this project? But yeah, it was like, yeah, you should move your a couple of these websites to just a Cloudfair pages and that's free. And then, you know, like

Bennett (15:42)
that cut off like thirty five bucks and then there was one that I just wasn't using anymore and it like, Hey, you don't really have any traffic and I honestly kinda just forgot about it and but I was still paying for it. and so it was like, you know, you should s consider like sunsetting or like just deactivating this this site. And so yeah, it was j it was again not through the finances app that we're talking about, but just like something that understands your projects and kind of you know, can kind of advise you on some helpful tips in in this case regards to finance. So yeah.

Bradley Bernard (16:08)
That's cool. Seventy

Bradley Bernard (16:09)
is a lot. I mean, that's seventy per month, right?

Bennett (16:11)
Yeah, yeah, something like that. Don't call me on the exact amount, but it was substantial

Bradley Bernard (16:13)
Okay.

Bennett (16:14)
because it was like there was like a web app. And the way that render works is they kinda push you into like a certain tier if you have X amount of apps or something. and so it was like if I got rid of one of those apps and then moved a couple of them to like a just a Cloudfare page, Cloudflare page, then I would fall back below that like tier where I could just go back to the cheaper monthly plan instead of like the one up that they had to kinda push me into. So

Bradley Bernard (16:37)
Mm-hmm. And that that's kind of the

Bennett (16:38)
yeah, it was it was nice. I was like, This is good. I like that.

Bradley Bernard (16:40)
stuff that you don't care for and like you're not

Bennett (16:43)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (16:43)
gonna look at yourself. But if you ask AI or other agents to dive into this,

Bennett (16:47)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (16:48)
and then it finds that, you're like, yeah, why would I not do that? But I don't know if I'd spend, you 30 minutes looking into that myself personally.

Bennett (16:54)
No, yeah. And also too, like, it's one of those things that as over time as you add new projects and add new sites, you don't like to again take a step back and look at it holistically. And so like to have

Bradley Bernard (17:03)
Yeah.

Bennett (17:04)
the ability to do that and like just have it look at everything. And again, I'm pretty sure that was with I was using the render plugin, within Codex and it just yeah, it just worked, which is awesome.

Bradley Bernard (17:13)
Yeah,

Bradley Bernard (17:13)
the plugins are good now. Codex is great. I I know you're

Bennett (17:15)
Yeah, yeah.

Bradley Bernard (17:16)
talking about Cloudflare. I saw an article about Cloudflare being a little bit too AI pill, but they recently released Cloudflare OS. I have not caught up with it, but I know you list it as a topic. So please catch me up.

Bennett (17:27)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (17:27)
What what is going on here?

Bennett (17:29)
Yeah. And so like I'm still wrapping my head around it, but I think the kind of interesting interesting thing about it is I feel like right now there's like a kind of a fork in the road of like what is the experiences that like we're building for who's going to be using the web in the future. And like those are all things I've seen kind of talked about online.

Bradley Bernard (17:49)
Definitely.

Bennett (17:49)
And in this one, so I have two things from Cloudflare I wanted to kind of chat about.

Bennett (17:54)
This one or this announcement is from like the Cloudflare OS. and so basically what it looks like is it looks like a workspace that like you can kind of just basically chat with agents and like kick off a bunch of workflows. So almost like a Slack

Bradley Bernard (18:06)
Yeah.

Bennett (18:07)
kind of thing. Like it looks like, and if you look at the videos, it kind of looks like a like a chat window where you're like, you know, writing a question to the model, but then it has like access to, you know, like your your environment. it can like run deterministic workflows.

Bradley Bernard (18:20)
Very interesting.

Bradley Bernard (18:21)
Is this like a Claude Code Codex competitor?

Bennett (18:25)
It's I don't know because I I don't think it's that necessarily 'cause like you can plug it in with those other models. so like, you know, I'm looking at the screenshots and it's like it's a a window and then it has like you can think where you can pick your model and so then the screenshot they have, they have like Kimmy K point or two point six or whatever. But I I saw

Bradley Bernard (18:42)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (18:42)
another video they were using an Opus model. So I it's I guess it's kind of like that. I feel like it's like a desktop app that kind of, you know, maybe has some similarities to Codex or

Bennett (18:52)
you know, the kind of desktop apps that you know you use with these different frontier models. But it's just in they're calling like an agent workspace. And so like just has all the context and skills that like your company has. they have some some language in here about like actually having like security and governance kind of built in like first and foremost with the release of this. so like how you can kind of really provision agent access like really cleanly. So there's not any kind of

Bennett (19:18)
you know, unintended agent access that you really wouldn't want it to have and it starts kind of doing stuff, right? So

Bradley Bernard (19:24)
And

Bradley Bernard (19:24)
I I just see that it's open source too. Interesting.

Bennett (19:26)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (19:27)
Yeah. So Cloudflare, it's a mouthful. I don't know why I struggle to say that word, but

Bradley Bernard (19:32)
Yeah.

Bennett (19:32)
yeah, they mean and to your point about being AI pilled, yeah. I mean, I feel like I use them so much for like all kinds of stuff. I mean, I've always used them for like

Bradley Bernard (19:39)
Same.

Bennett (19:39)
DNS stuff, you know, but in going to what we were talking about earlier with the kind of render discussion, like Codex was like, Yeah, you should use Cloudflare, which has a connector or plugin in Codex. And so it was like you should just use that to like host some static pages, and then you can have like a worker that like

Bennett (19:56)
And I'll be honest, I don't fully, I'm not like a worker expert, but like it has like things where you can kind of just

Bradley Bernard (20:01)
People love workers.

Bennett (20:02)
yeah, yeah, and it can kind of do a bunch of stuff for you. And then like there's like a CLI with like Wrangler. So I have like on one of my websites,

Bradley Bernard (20:09)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (20:09)
it's a it's just a static page. And then it likes we set up a like I don't know what the Cloudflare calls it, but like it's like a database. I think it's like D1 or something like that. Yeah. I wish I can remember what it's called.

Bradley Bernard (20:19)
yeah, I think that sounds right. They have

Bradley Bernard (20:23)
they have D one and R one. I think R one's S three. I think maybe

Bennett (20:27)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (20:28)
it's D one or D two? I don't know. We don't know.

Bennett (20:30)
Something

Bennett (20:31)
one. It's a it's a letter and a one. But but yeah, I mean, so like Codex had like some of the context and like connected to Cloudflare via the plugin, and it just was like, Hey, yeah, you know, as part of saving money on the render bill, let's set you up on Cloudflare with like this, and it just did all that stuff for me. So yeah, Cloudflare seems to be again really shipping a lot of like AI stuff. And I again I think a lot of the stuff I've seen from them kind of comes from.

Bennett (20:58)
like a more agent driven like web you know, web world, I guess, for lack of a better term. Like it seems like I think they saw something recently that they like the majority of internet traffic now is done by like agents or maybe that was either now or soon. I can't remember exactly what it was, but

Bradley Bernard (21:15)
Which is

Bradley Bernard (21:15)
crazy. I mean, I have first hand experience in this because I've been using Codec so much for web stuff. But part of it is like I ask a query to codex and it'll go web search, which means it's not using my browser, but it's just querying stuff almost like Google is. But the other half is I ask it to use my browser, my login credentials, and like navigate through pages. And it feels like such low effort to get these tasks done now that it's just

Bradley Bernard (21:40)
Amazing to kick one off and approve a few things here and there for security's sake, but sensitive actions using my browser feel very doable now. And even not even sensitive actions, like sensitive being like a bank or something crazy like that, but even like normal things I don't want to do. Like one that I had as an example was posting an eBay listing of an old gaming laptop that I wanted to get rid of. I took photos, dumped it into a codex thread and was saying, Hey, I'm logged into eBay, make the listing for me. And it

Bradley Bernard (22:10)
Research competitors, found the right price, did the shipping estimate, you know, a attach the photos, even blurt out the serial number in the photo that I attached, because it was like, hey, this is sensitive. Like you shouldn't post an eBay photo with your serial number. And I was like, damn, this was incredible. And part of it's the harness, part of it's the model. other part is enabling like Chrome access with the Chrome plugin that Chat GPT has now or Codex has now. But it's like

Bradley Bernard (22:36)
I'm not like I'm navigating the web, you know, I'm still on X from time to time and I'm on YouTube and all that fun stuff. But I have a large part of my traffic being driven by an agent driving my own browser. And it it feels like that's only gonna ramp up significantly. And Cloudflare is like almost the internet front door. I think it serves like one in three requests, or maybe serves is the wrong word, but is involved in like one out of three requests across the whole internet. So they definitely have a finger on the pulse there. And I'm curious what they're gonna build.

Bradley Bernard (23:06)
To make that come a reality. Then likewise, I don't know if you saw this release, but it was Cursor or SpaceX or XAI, whatever their name is now. They released bot or something like that, which could be similar to Cloudflare OS, where

Bennett (23:18)
Yeah. Yeah, Grokbot, I think. Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (23:22)
yeah, they have some like chat interface, it has access to things. I I'll be honest, I'm not fully up to date on their positioning here, but people seem to like it. So it feels like there's an emerging category of

Bradley Bernard (23:35)
Enabling AI and workflows in a chat interface that, you know, is not codec or cloud code, but it's it's growing. It's good to have competition there.

Bennett (23:43)
Yeah, well and I think just variety too, 'cause I think, you know, it's and I think there was one that I think came out recently called Buzz, which I think was being marketed as like the slack replacement, but more agent driven.

Bradley Bernard (23:52)
yeah, that was

Bradley Bernard (23:54)
that was block, maybe? Yeah.

Bennett (23:55)
Yeah, I think they did it. Or Jack Dorsey,

Bennett (23:57)
I'm not sure if but it w I know it was him, but I don't know if it's like part of block or something separate. But it feels like there's also an appetite from people to have agents just kind of be where people already are. And so in this case, Slack. And

Bradley Bernard (24:08)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (24:08)
I you know, I think you know, there's Claude Tag, I think, which is a Slack kind of based thing

Bradley Bernard (24:12)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (24:13)
too. or or I know Claude has a Slack integration that you can kind of just Slack it like it's any other employee. and so I think there's

Bennett (24:19)
you know, differences of like where you can go to an app and chat with, you know, AI, like that that's like the Codex app traditionally. you know, before that it was the web app and you go to, you know, chat GPT.com. And then, you know, now it's like, hey, these agents can kind of just be in your system, you know, and whether that's you know in Slack or Buzz or like this Cloudfl Cloudflare OS. I struggle with that word. I don't know why. but but yeah I mean and and it's it's funny 'cause you mentioned the eBay thing because

Bennett (24:46)
I had something similar where I was like, I'm just gonna use codecs and just see what happens. So I was going to like just like a kind of a networking event in in like my local area and I didn't have any like business cards. I don't I don't have like business cards, you know, it's just that's kind of a relic of the past, in my opinion. And so I was like, Well, I can probably just make like a QR code that will just go to my website and like auto add my contact information.

Bennett (25:10)
in like if people scan it and like it pops up on

Bradley Bernard (25:13)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (25:13)
iOS you know add contact or whatever. So I just literally told Codex I was like, make me a QR code that like if they take a picture of it will just populate my information like in their in their contacts or whatever. And it took 15 minutes and did it and it did like a branded little like you know like B because my name's you know Bennett of course. And so a branded little B and then like it was like the QR code. It worked like it was it was crazy. And I was like

Bradley Bernard (25:35)
That's cool.

Bennett (25:36)
And I know like 'cause I w before I did that, I was looking up, was like, do I to pay for this? Like, should I I think there was one that was like my QR code.com. I was like, I don't want to pay for that. Yeah, yeah. It was like fifty bucks a year or something like that. I'm like, I'm not paying for that. So

Bradley Bernard (25:44)
And it was paid? Yeah. Heck no. Not not not in today's day and age.

Bennett (25:50)
yeah. And so it just g it can just figure it out, you know. And so yeah, I mean those those apps are incredible. But then on the the thing with Cloudflare too, that I was gonna mention is they also released, I think it was like a couple weeks ago, this thing called Kitesurf. And it's actually

Bennett (26:04)
Because you mentioned the Google Chrome web browser thing. So they released something called Kite Surf, which is a more agent enabled or like a lighter kind of web browser. Because I think the what they said in the article was, you know, modern browsers like Chrome and others are written or made for humans to digest and understand information.

Bradley Bernard (26:23)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (26:24)
And so there's a lot of overhead, like tech wise, that comes with that. And so this

Bennett (26:29)
They built like a brand new browser, I guess primarily in Rust. So it's supposed be really fast and and really lightweight.

Bradley Bernard (26:35)
Course.

Bennett (26:36)
Yeah. And and so they're saying like this might be the future for like, you know, if you're using an agent and it needs to do some kind of web search, instead of opening up like Google for Chrome or I think Chromium, right, is like the other

Bradley Bernard (26:47)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (26:48)
browser that they can use, it would just use Kite Surf and be much faster and have less hurdles. Yeah. So

Bradley Bernard (26:53)
That's very interesting, actually. Huh. I I totally

Bradley Bernard (26:56)
missed that release. I don't know when that came out, but I must have been I'm gonna I'm gonna say I was in Europe at that time. So I was just taking a look at

Bennett (27:02)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (27:02)
the article that you linked. And yeah, it looks very interesting. I I think the the problem with the outline of you know a more secure agent friendly browser sounds right. And if they're able to rewrite all this using, you know, AI over time, sounds like a good gig. I know having the Chrome plugin for ChatGPT just

Bradley Bernard (27:19)
gets you in the zone so that codex can control the browser. But you know, we we did used to have our own browser Atlas that got sunset recently. I wonder where these things exist. Like we're seeing this bubble up of browsers, of agentic workspaces with chat interfaces. We're seeing Slack like Claude Tag. Like it feels like we're trying to bring all the agents closer to you and like enable them to use your tools. But this browser is almost like a tool built for an agent.

Bradley Bernard (27:48)
And so there's both methods of bringing it closer, but also building like tailor made solutions for agents. So I don't know where it'll end up. I've I've seen both sides of the story, but it seems like Cloudflare is shipping a ton. Like I it's hard for me to even keep up with what they're doing. And I'm also a happy user of Cloudflare across all my sites, but I don't touch a lot of their new stuff. I'll be very honest. I I don't use workers very often. I'm in the PHP bandwagon, but

Bradley Bernard (28:14)
Feels like they're doing something right. I I do wonder again, I saw an article recently criticizing them about how much that they're shipping, because, you know, in the age of AI, every company is trying to do something related to AI and they are doing a whole lot of it. so I'm curious how their kind of product portfolio and the perception of Cloudflare as it became this DNS centric area and now is moving to this like agentic AI solutions for

Bradley Bernard (28:39)
Almost a lot of things, so I don't know how that'll end up, but hat hats off for them for shipping.

Bennett (28:44)
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean it's they've been doing a lot. And like, yeah, I I've used a worker, but I couldn't tell you exactly what it was doing, you know? yeah, yeah. My agent, you know, codex did

Bradley Bernard (28:52)
So your agent used a worker or

Bennett (28:56)
something with a worker. And so I and it worked, and I was like, cool. And I think that goes to like we've talked a lot about on this you know, podcast about like just what does coding mean and like what is how do you engineer with AI and stuff now? And it's like it's been a big mental thing for me.

Bennett (29:12)
I'd say like last year and the year before, I felt like I needed to really still understand the code a lot to like feel good about shipping something.

Bradley Bernard (29:21)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (29:22)
And like I've and it's been a struggle, but like I've gradually been like, it's gonna know it better than me. So like why do I need to bottleneck myself and be like, explain this to me? Like there's a level to it that you do have to understand, of course, because you need to make sure it interpreted what you're asking for correctly.

Bennett (29:39)
But like

Bradley Bernard (29:39)
Yeah.

Bennett (29:40)
the actual architecture, like what am I gonna say about like what GPT five point six soul extra high did? You know, like I'm not gonna have anything better,

Bradley Bernard (29:46)
Yeah.

Bennett (29:48)
you know, like just from like there might be things like from like a business context that like I would understand better or like just information it didn't convey very well. But like if it has a full picture and it has a really good understanding of what you're trying to do, like you gotta just, you know, again, trust but verify. But like that's been one of my blocks is like.

Bennett (30:06)
just having to feel like I still need to understand every single line of code, you know. So like it's

Bradley Bernard (30:11)
Yeah.

Bennett (30:11)
that's that's a struggle.

Bradley Bernard (30:13)
There's an interesting Twitter thread I saw recently talking about so we have GPT five dot six soul an extra high takes a while to do things. There's fast mode, which gets you, I think, 1.5x the speed, but obviously costs more money. you can use that in subscription and API billing. But recently there was announced that OpenAI is working on the like ultra fast mode, which is just way, way faster tokens per second.

Bradley Bernard (30:37)
I think it's in very, very limited preview, but there's a conversation saying you can do multiple things with agents because it takes time per turn. If you're generating a website, you're saying do this. It takes minute, two, three, four minutes, depending on what you ask, and it comes back. But if the AI was able to generate code at 10x the speed, you would be more in the zone and like have a live conversation where you didn't have to go wait and do something else. And at that point, good luck reading any code at the speed that it's able to write.

Bradley Bernard (31:06)
I thought that's actually a very interesting take because the history of software engineering was before AI, it took a long time for you to write something. So you had full understanding of what you wrote when it came to code review processes, people trusted you, but also there wasn't as much volume. So you could review code and not block other people. Now it takes one hour to generate 10,000 lines of code, and it's your job to trim that down, have validation, verification, all that. But once we get to the world where we're able to ship and generate

Bradley Bernard (31:34)
you know, 10x the amount of code in an hour. Like, where do we stop reviewing the code? When do we start trusting it more and more? And I don't have an answer for that. And I don't think a lot of people do. But maybe it'll become more front and center. Like we're seeing a lot of AI companies like build their own chips or just chip companies are like pivoting to do a lot more data center focused tasks to make inference more optimized. And it feels like all the arrows are pointing this direction of

Bradley Bernard (31:58)
We're in like AI V2 where agents have picked up the coding models are really damn good. You can almost put your hands off of the code and let it drive. But once you're able to do a 10x, you know, volume output of code, like at that point, I don't know. Feels like you gotta really let go. But then that's scary. Like, you know, security incidents

Bennett (32:14)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (32:15)
are the the end all be all for all these like vibe coded slop software and those hurt and you know, you don't really recover from that as a business. So how do you move fast as a business and try to like review all this AI generated code?

Bradley Bernard (32:27)
And do even need to? w we should definitely talk more about that. But that one really kind of spawned of I definitely review the code, but yeah, there is a world in which I think things will change. And I don't know when that'll be. And I think we've said this for a while, but maybe it's sooner than later. I don't know.

Bennett (32:44)
Yeah. I mean my my review these days is like trying to make sure it I I understand it didn't add anything I didn't want 'cause that that's the tendency

Bradley Bernard (32:51)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (32:52)
is like, like let me also do X, Y, and Z. It's like I didn't ask for that. I don't want you do that. And so like a lot of times it's like kind of steering that or like trimming some of that out. but the actual like functionality, I'm like, Hey, run your tests and make sure everything looks good and if everything looks good, go ahead and come in and, you know, push and that's it. So

Bradley Bernard (33:10)
Yeah.

Bennett (33:11)
You know, like it's it's pretty remarkable, you know. So it's yeah, and that's and that's a long way. That's

Bradley Bernard (33:15)
Software is so cheap.

Bennett (33:17)
a long way from just a year ago, you know. I I think

Bradley Bernard (33:19)
Yeah.

Bennett (33:20)
I remember when you were talking about that Empower MCP back in that's probably November or December of twenty twenty five, I wanna say. That wasn't that long ago. And now here we are with

Bradley Bernard (33:29)
It wasn't.

Bennett (33:29)
a full functioning plugin with your finances and it can make charts and all that kind of stuff. It's just the space or

Bradley Bernard (33:32)
Yeah. Yeah, I was

Bennett (33:35)
the pace is crazy.

Bradley Bernard (33:37)
yeah, once that came out, I was like, you know, I love the software that I wrote and I always have a connection to it. But one, it was vibe coded heavily, but it worked. But two, this experience is like way better. So I was like, I don't think I'll ever touch that again, but that's okay. Like this I want a better experience. And however I get that, whether that's my software or like a published, you know, full connector within ChatGBT, I don't really care. So that that's the beauty of it, is that

Bradley Bernard (34:00)
the experience is great and software is cheap now where I don't feel like, my God, I wasted my time or if I had worked on a side project like this, it would take me weeks and weeks. And if I got, you know, surlocked by some official company releasing something, I'd be like, you know, that's kind of a bummer. But now I actually could care less and I prefer the better integration. So it's a very wor weird world in which we live in where software is so cheap. But high quality software, having judgment, having taste, that stuff is still incredibly valuable. Like most people can detect

Bradley Bernard (34:29)
when it's an AI generated website and UI and all that stuff. So

Bennett (34:34)
Mm-hmm.

Bradley Bernard (34:34)
I think the models still have a long way to go to getting good taste. And that's like hard to put your finger on. And I've seen startups come out with trying to solve that problem, like understanding what a good design is is that design tokens, coloring, spacing, like how do you grade a good design? very interesting questions, but I think the models still have some some time to go there.

Bennett (34:55)
Yep. For sure. Crazy world. Crazy world we're all living in.

Bradley Bernard (35:00)
Yeah. And then the last thing that I want to talk about, which I think has probably confused a lot of people, maybe even yourself, Ben, but there's been a chat GPT work mode. So if you open up the mobile app or the web interface, essentially there's a toggle on the top of your chats, which is essentially chat or work. And the the big factor between work mode is that it's kind of closer to codex. You're a developer and you've used codecs. Codex can get a lot of things done. It'll search the web, it'll create Python scripts.

Bradley Bernard (35:29)
You name it, and it does this all kind of on your computer. chat GPT work mode is the culmination of that, but this is more a remote server or a virtual machine that you ask a query, it's able to use that machine to, you know, fetch data, write Python scripts, execute it, build these artifacts for you, and do much longer running processes. So chat is like, I don't know if this is the perfect phrasing, but in my book, it's more for like quicker questions, not as deep, mathematical or researchy. and work is like

Bradley Bernard (35:59)
more complicated things. They can use a browser. So there's a cloud browser now, which is crazy. But as we've talked about this whole agentic browsing, now it can open up a browser for you. Like chat GPT chat mode cannot do that. so this is kind of the differentiating factor of if you want a browser, if you want a virtual machine, it's a little bit kind of fuzzy. honestly the the reception has been mixed, but I have been leaning to work mode for the majority of things and only for the simple things have I been going back to chat.

Bradley Bernard (36:27)
And I think that part is a really big distinction of like, do I want to use the browser? One thing that I was trying to book is the Odyssey tickets. And I was like, hey, this is where I live. I want IMAX and I want you to go figure out the seats. And so I basically found my zip code, found the found the you know, movie theaters around me, opened up a website, which I'd never heard of. I can't remember the name, but essentially had a seat map view and rendered the webpage, like took a screenshot, analyzed what

Bradley Bernard (36:54)
Seats were available to me and told me, hey, nothing is really good this weekend. Like there's only seats in the front or like a single seat in the back. And my query was two seats that are like not in, you know, like you're you're gonna break your neck territory. And it was really cool to see Chat GPT work go off on that task, which I know Codex would be able to do it because it has my browser. Like I give it control due to that Chrome plugin. But ChatGPT work is a closer rendition of that where it's able to use a browser. And that one feels like a big unlock to me. So

Bradley Bernard (37:22)
If you're confused about it, this is my hopefully simple explanation. But I would lean towards work for the most part. Chat for simple things. definitely ask it to use the browser too. If it's something like I don't know, movie tickets, I think is a great example. I think there's rolling out support for reservations. So you don't necessarily need a browser for something like a Yelp reservation or like I think it was Resi, maybe. I can't remember the exact connection, but some of these things are being more built in. But for things that don't

Bradley Bernard (37:50)
have official support, the browser is super valuable and it does really cool things. So I've been using it a lot. I've loved it and it's a little bit confusing, but let me know if you've had good experiences with the browser in the work mode. I think it really can do a lot and you kind of have to reframe your your mind around asking prompts for things that might seem impossible before, but are now possible.

Bennett (38:12)
Yeah. Yeah, I so that announcement I think came out right around the same time as like the five point six soul and Luna and Terra models. And so I think my main focus was like how amazing those models were. Like I five point

Bradley Bernard (38:26)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (38:26)
six soul is like my daily my daily one. I

Bradley Bernard (38:29)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (38:29)
usually just have it on medium if it's like anything, and then if it's like actually really complicated, I'll go extra high. I don't I don't ever use ultra or like fast mode or anything like that. But

Bennett (38:39)
On like the actual integration of the apps, I will say it was it's still a little bit confusing for me, just because the main thing, at least when I look at mobile now, and I maybe, you know, I maybe I need to update, but like when I look at mobile now, there's chat and there's work, but then it's there's nothing called codex, it's just called remote. And like that is how to get to mobile

Bradley Bernard (38:58)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (38:59)
on on on that's how to get to codex on mobile. Whereas like on

Bradley Bernard (39:03)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (39:04)
the code, on the actual chat GPT app,

Bennett (39:06)
there's the drop down to do chat GPT versus Codex. So it's almost like on the mobile side there's no recognition that Codex is Codex. It's just called remote. And it's like that I know what it is, but like just from naming and

Bradley Bernard (39:17)
Yeah.

Bennett (39:18)
like inconsistency, that's kind of where I get a little confused. But yeah, I mean I pretty much only use chat for for like everything 'cause a lot of my stuff is kinda just little questions here or there. But if I'm actually like doing like work stuff, I tend to still just use Codecs. I haven't used work very much. Maybe a couple of times here and there, but

Bennett (39:36)
Yeah, just I've always either just defaulted to codecs or or just

Bradley Bernard (39:39)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (39:39)
if it's quick questions, just chat.

Bradley Bernard (39:41)
Yeah, I think I think the last thing about work mode on mobile is that it does have access to those automations that feel a lot more first class. So I think the finances automation that I have for setting up recurring weekly snapshots, I think does use the work mode. I might not be a hundred percent correct on that, but it feels like the scheduled tasks, which I think was the old rendition of like doing things on a cadence, there's a new product name for it. I can't remember what it is, but

Bradley Bernard (40:06)
Essentially, think it uses work mode since it does have these, you know, VMs on the fly that it's able to do much more robust integrations. But exactly as you're saying, I think the codex tab, which was on the chat UBT app, got renamed to remote. And then now there's a chat and work. So yeah, the chat and work, simple things on chat, more complicated things on work with a browser access. Then if you want to go back to your computer, hit that remote button, that'll get you there. Then

Bradley Bernard (40:30)
On the Mac OS side, yeah, a little complicated. We had the ChatGPT app, we had the Codex app. There was the big merge, which maybe some of you have heard about. If you're, you know, not on X in the AI bubble, you probably haven't heard about it. You basically update your ChatGPT Mac OS app. It gets kind of like replaced into this Codex app. And depending on what mode you choose and these this kind of onboarding flow, you can stay in Codex or you can kind of go back to like Chat GPT classic, which is like the old looking chat GPT mode. But

Bradley Bernard (40:58)
Little bumps and bruises. I'll be honest, even myself as like an employee of OpenAI, we're using the software at home, doing the upgrade path. you know, maybe a little bit to be desired. But I think once you get through that hurdle, and the way things exist today, it's still not crystal clear on what goes where, but it's getting closer to this ultimate merge of like you don't have to think about what mode you choose and things are local and you can access your computer. So

Bradley Bernard (41:25)
It feels like there's a good product vision that's coming into play and these things are merging, which is great. It's not in its final end state, but it it's getting close to like what feels to be you know, a first class experience. So if you haven't used the work mode, definitely try it. If you haven't used Codex Remote, definitely try it. I use it a lot. Basically connecting your mobile app to your computer and you can just ask codex things on the go.

Bennett (41:48)
Yeah. I mean I I think in that scenario, people that were used to using the Chat GPT desktop app were gonna, you know, feel aggrieved with like Codex, but then people that were used to Codex didn't wanna go back to like the Chat GPT desktop

Bradley Bernard (42:01)
Exactly.

Bennett (42:01)
app. But you gotta I mean I it makes total sense why the merge happened. So like I think it was just people got into their routines and what they were happy using. It's funny 'cause like from my own personal experience, like I think starting from the very beginning, it's like, you know, I used cursor.

Bennett (42:17)
in you know, as like a IDE and so there's like my AI and that. And then I remember

Bradley Bernard (42:21)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (42:21)
you were kind of pushing the CLI and I was like, okay, fine. I finally got on like the CLI. And then I remember using the CLI and being happy with it. And then I remember like I we talked about this a couple months ago. but like then you were in town where I'm at here in Arizona and like you're using the Codex desktop app. And I'm like, really? Like you're using that after you're all about the CLI, you

Bradley Bernard (42:37)
Mm. Yeah.

Bennett (42:40)
know? And you're like, no, it's the best. And so now I'm like using that. And like so now it's but like yeah. So it's just it just depends on

Bennett (42:46)
you know, what you enjoy using and everyone has their own different kind of preference. But yeah, there's just been so much change in the space. It's just, you know, hard to keep up. No.

Bradley Bernard (42:55)
It

Bradley Bernard (42:55)
is hard to keep up. I mean, yeah, we've been gone for three months and a lot has changed, obviously. This is a snapshot of what exists today, but yeah, in two weeks, who knows what's coming out, who knows what's gonna change, who knows what companies are forming or disbanding. Honestly, right now it feels like and I've said this before, it feels like you can pretty much do anything. I can ask for things in codex using five dot six soul extra high and it just gets the job done like

Bradley Bernard (43:19)
I have upgraded my PHP versions from 8.3 to 8.5, which for people who aren't familiar is not like a huge upgrade, but you know, for software things, it's super boring. And I kicked off a codex thread and it's doing it. It's monitoring like my deployments, doing all that. Like as we speak right now, I can see it monitoring things, which is great. even like I'm trying to sell my Snapchat shares as a former employee. I'm ready to let it go. if you've looked at the stock, it's been a little bumpy. and I'm ready to part ways. And I told it like, you know, here's my logged in, you know,

Bradley Bernard (43:48)
bank like get ready to do the trade and like monitor the trade in the morning so that when it lands like the price is good. Like it just feels like you can do anything and that's like a fun, exciting thing. And these things only get better and better. If I could do all this today, like what's it gonna look like in one year, in three years? Like I don't freaking know, but that's exciting and also scary too. I think that part's to be figured out. But yeah, I think right now if you open up the Codex app, you can do a whole lot. If you open up Chat GPT you can do a whole lot, but

Bradley Bernard (44:15)
I'm definitely living in Codex and I

Bennett (44:17)
Yeah.

Bradley Bernard (44:18)
have a great time there.

Bennett (44:19)
Yeah. Cool. Should we wrap it up with some bookmarks, Brad?

Bradley Bernard (44:23)
Yeah, let's do it. Kick us off.

Bennett (44:24)
All right, so I'm actually gonna do one and it actually relates to what you were just talking about. so there was a white paper, I think is what you call that was published actually recently about codec usage. And so I'll include a link in there. But what I found really interesting about it was talked about how users are using codecs and it ranged from I think people that actually work, you know, at those frontier labs versus people that are like, you know, pretty good users of AI versus like just completely new users.

Bennett (44:53)
And so they they segmented it into three different buckets of people. And basically the premise was like, what can the highest users tell us about, you know, how codex is being used across organizations? What can like non engineering? I think that was the bucketing. I think it was like engineers at the frontier labs, maybe engineers elsewhere, then like non engineers or something like that. And but basically it was like Codex was showing a huge growth in non engineers. So I think finance, I think legal, marketing.

Bennett (45:23)
And like what are some of the traits that like, you know, were being noticed and observed as to like why that was. And it was super interesting because one of the key themes was like obviously the desktop app and being, you know, able to kind of work alongside files on your computer and your workspace, which is super useful,

Bradley Bernard (45:37)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (45:38)
taking it out of like the web app, which a lot of people were still stuck in. Again, again, especially non engineering people that maybe don't think and live in X AI world all the time. and so being able to kind of like

Bennett (45:49)
realize that you can do a lot more things on your computer with browser use and all that kind of stuff, right?

Bradley Bernard (45:53)
Yeah.

Bennett (45:54)
but then two, it was really like the focus was on like delegation versus like automation. And I think that's something that really stuck with me. Like in in my career, like being in accounting and, you know, being a like a leader of teams, it's like sometimes people think about like AI as like automation and like it it can automate, certainly. Like it can write, you know, Python scripts or, you bash scripts and do a bunch of cool stuff for you.

Bennett (46:19)
But almost like the way that you need to kind of think about it is more like delegation. And like we've talked on this podcast a lot about how it's like it's kinda like an intern, you know, you gotta give it some direction

Bradley Bernard (46:26)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (46:27)
and you kinda gotta monitor it a little bit and it's it's getting smarter as these models get smarter. But like the the overall point was like that white paper made it very clear that like it's really about like how you can kind of delegate and kick off tasks that free you up to go do something else, you know. And so like

Bradley Bernard (46:42)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (46:42)
the productivity gains are like really measurable once you kind of like adopt that like, hey, I can

Bennett (46:48)
Tell Codex to go do this. And it doesn't have to be Codex, but this is what the paper was written on. But any AI that's kind of living in like a desktop app type scenario, I can like go ask it to do these two or three things, and then I can go do something else. And like that

Bradley Bernard (47:01)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (47:02)
just frees up your time, makes you more productive. And like the intelligence is there where like you can trust the results that you're gonna get better than you probably could back when it was, you know, O three or whatever, four.

Bradley Bernard (47:14)
Yeah.

Bennett (47:15)
it you know, so like that was a really interesting thing. So I'll include the link. but yeah, that was my book.

Bradley Bernard (47:20)
Yeah,

Bradley Bernard (47:21)
that's interesting. I I had one kind of tidbit on that is I was trying to unsubscribe from emails to reclaim my email inbox because I am in spam hell. And there's no official Apple mail connector. So this weekend, yesterday actually, I had asked Codex like, go through the past ninety days of my emails and unsubscribe from things that are purely marketing, keep transactional. And if there's anything, you know, not that you're not sure about, ask me. And it made it through all this, like use my computer to

Bradley Bernard (47:49)
paged through all my email results and unsubscribe from a ton of them. But one of them, it tried unsubscribing and it said the link was bad. And I looked at it and it was this like crypto looking link. And I go, How about we don't click on that one next time? so I guess that one it almost made it. Almost made it. Not that I got hacked. You know, everything went well, but I looked at it and thought, Yeah, we probably shouldn't click on that anymore. And then right after that, I turned it into a monthly automation in the Codex app. So

Bradley Bernard (48:15)
One is like do something which you don't want to do and it gives, you know, you give permissions and you work on something else, which I was doing. Two, you come back and monitor and check the results. And then three, if it works out, package that into a skill, which you don't have to do anything anymore. You just say set up a recurring automation to run this, like and it knows what this is since it's in the chat, every month. And so I have a automation to unsubscribe from emails that I don't care about in Apple Mail on my Mac computer running every month. So yeah, there's a whole mut whole like

Bradley Bernard (48:45)
Pleth of speed ups right now that are quite insane, which I love. But yeah, jumping to my bookmark, if you're using AI tools and Claude, Codex, any AI model is explaining code to you, and you're scratching your head thinking there's got to be a better way to understand this. there's a tweet recently by Dex Horthy. Hopefully I said that right. He it works at Human Layer, which is a company that I believe is trying to build like an IDE for teams, like a multiplayer.

Bradley Bernard (49:14)
AI IDE. He gives a ton of talks at conferences like AI Engineer, Cloud Code Meetups, et cetera. So he's definitely in the know. Basically, he created a skill called slash show me that you can invoke that will just show me a visual representation of how the code changed, not necessarily a giant blob of text. there's different artifacts. There's like an HTML artifact, which will do more visuals. There's like a call stack diagram, which kind of shows like the functions that it calls before and after.

Bradley Bernard (49:42)
Things that you don't really have to know and kind of dig through this explanation, which can be very technical jargony, but more give me something that I can understand at a high level. And as we talked about reviewing less code, I feel like this comes hand in hand where I might not know what this function does internally. Like I trust Codex to figure that out or Claude to figure that out. But this is like the general structure. This is how it feels in my code base. These are the things that matter to me. And I think I I still need to use this skill. But when I saw it, I thought that is a great idea because there are times where I am reading

Bradley Bernard (50:11)
explanations from you know the latest five dot six soul model and I'm like I get why it's saying this but man the mental load on reading some of these things can be quite high. even for someone who's you know been doing software for a long time. I look at it and I'm like I gotta read that like two or three times. You know, I I it's it's it's important stuff, you know, especially working on important code, but there's probably a better way to package it. And so I'll try this skill out soon. But if you haven't heard of it and you run into the same problem, definitely try it out.

Bradley Bernard (50:40)
slash show me and it's like a simple npx install. It's npx skills add human layer slash skills dash dash skill show me. I'm not gonna type that out but you get how easy that is and then you can invoke it from your favorite agent. But very cool. I think we need more of this. there's Dslopify skills that are coming out and show me skills kind of the next evolution of how you can use AI coding tools a bit better given their high intelligence and understanding these days.

Bennett (51:07)
Yeah. No, I I think that's that's super useful. 'Cause I mean, I agree. Sometimes it's like all the code that's written, like we were saying, like I don't really feel like I need to go and read all that, you know, but it'd be nice to get

Bradley Bernard (51:15)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (51:16)
like a high level understanding. And it's interesting. HTML has really kind of picked up as a good way to visualize things again.

Bradley Bernard (51:22)
Yeah.

Bennett (51:22)
'Cause you know, in the past you'd have to write it and HTML is very like lengthy and very like very strict on the rules and stuff like that. And you had to know the tags and CSS and all that, but like in an agent world.

Bennett (51:35)
it can spin that up in two seconds and give you like a

Bradley Bernard (51:37)
Yeah.

Bennett (51:37)
beautiful like I just had something when I was at work, I was trying to understand like a high level picture of like my team's work and the tasks that they were doing. And so I just gave it to you know, to Claude and it just went through and made like this really good like kind of sand key diagram. It wasn't exactly a sand key diagram,

Bradley Bernard (51:55)
Mm-hmm.

Bennett (51:56)
but just kinda like a flow. And I was like that was so much better than like an Excel pivot table, which is like what I would have defaulted to,

Bradley Bernard (52:01)
Yeah.

Bennett (52:02)
you know, two years ago probably.

Bennett (52:04)
And like that's that's the way. So no, that's cool. It's cool that they have that. I'll check that out.

Bradley Bernard (52:07)
Yeah. I mean, even sometimes

Bradley Bernard (52:09)
I ask it to make an artifact that I want, but other times I'm hands off the wheel and like, create me a visual. Like that's all I'll say and I see what it comes up with. Sometimes it's not perfect, but we're getting to that point where I think there's some discussions of giving more context almost like hurts the model because it knows more than you. we're not fully there yet, but interesting conversation. So yeah, definitely check out that skill and if you use it, let me know and let us know in the comments.

Bennett (52:33)
Cool. Alrighty. Well, let's wrap it up. we're back with season two and you know, getting back in the swing of things. So good stuff, lots of stuff to catch up on. Yeah, yeah. And we'll come

Bradley Bernard (52:40)
Yeah, we're so back.

Bennett (52:44)
back come back at you at the next episode here in a little bit. But cool, good chat, Brad. Awesome.

Bradley Bernard (52:48)
Yeah. Sounds good. See ya.

Bennett (52:51)
See you guys.