Claude Code Can Be Your Second Brain

[00:00] Noah Breyer might have the coolest cloud code setup I've ever seen. He rigged a home server in his basement, put his Obsidian Vault in it, [00:07] and then runs Claude Code on top. So he can think, research, write, and even ship code right from his phone. Today, he shows us how he uses Claude Code as a true second brain, a thinking partner that asks him sharp questions, pulls research from his whole Node Archive and the web, and even keeps a running log of what he's learned and what his best ideas are. And he walks us through his whole stack and his whole workflow. If you want to learn how to use Claude Code as a true second brain, this is the episode to watch. Let's dive in. [00:37] you [00:48] This podcast is supported by Google. Hi folks, Paige Bailey here from the Google DeepMind DevRel team. For our developers out there, we know there's a constant trade-off between model intelligence, speed, and cost. Gemini 2.5 Flash aims right at that challenge. It's got the speed you expect from Flash, but with upgraded reasoning power. And crucially, we've added controls, like setting thinking budgets, so you can decide how much reasoning to apply, optimizing for latency and costs. [01:18] world. [01:19] Noah, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you. It's really good to get to chat. This is our first interview in probably like five years. You are one of the, for people who don't know, you're one of the first super organizers interviewees. That was the newsletter that turned into Every. And I love the way that your brain works.

[01:49] And back in the day, you were using Evernote in all these really interesting ways. You were the co-founder of a really cool startup called Percolate, and then another one called Variance. And now you're running Alephic, which is an AI strategy consultancy. [02:03] and I'm just really excited to see how your... [02:08] mind has uh started to use these ai tools now that now that they're uh now that they're [02:15] working so well. And I know you have some pretty cool Claude code stuff to show us. So yeah, thanks for coming on. [02:21] Thanks for having me. I'm super excited. That was a fun interview all those years back. It was really, really fun. So I want to just dive right into the thing that I think is so cool about what you're doing. So I know you have a whole vibe coding setup that you built for yourself. Can you talk us through that? [02:42] Yeah, I wouldn't... I'm not sure about actually the vibe coding part of it. I have a sort of fairly heavy-duty cloud code set up, but actually... [02:55] Mostly not for code. So since those days of super organizers, like many people, I've abandoned Evernote and switched over to Obsidian. And one of the big advantages with Obsidian as a note taking platform is that it's a bunch of markdown files and a bunch of folders.

[03:25] lots of other fun kinds of things. And so actually probably my number one cloud code use is using it as a tool to interact with my notes. [03:38] And so that I've got a fairly serious cloud code setup that I use with Obsidian. And my most recent obsession has been standing up a server in my house so that I could also use cloud code on my phone. [03:56] This is incredible. I want to go through all of this. So where should we start? Should we do how you use CloudCode as sort of this like research assistant notes organizer note taker thing? Or should we start with how you use it on your phone? [04:13] We can use it. We can start with just the sort of general part of it. That might be the sort of easiest. The phone is really just an extension of that same thing. I would say sort of generally... [04:25] And this is something I feel like not enough people talk about with AI. It's like one of the things I find really extraordinary about it is the ability for me to... [04:35] um, work really productively on my phone. And that's been like a huge, huge change because so much of what I do is sort of writing or coding and the phone is definitely not the best place for that. And, you know, even the phone wasn't always the best place for doing research and thinking. Um, I felt like my computer was a better place for it, which is why I've been such a sort of note taker. And, um, you know, I have found whether it's like,

[04:59] Claude Code and Obsidian or, I mean, even Claude Code and Code, right? So like the other piece of it is being able to then, you know, if you see something go wrong, being able to sign in on your phone and have Claude Code push a small update to something because you just realize it while you're out is amazing. But then even like, you know, I use quite a bit of Grok voice mode. And, you know, [05:29] I have a Tesla, so now it's baked into the Tesla. And, you know, it's just I and, you know, obviously all the sort of other Chad Gbt and Claude and all these things of just being able to sort of like go and do research and really think and and explore things in this world. [05:46] Device that's always been useful, but like not useful for deep work, I think is probably something most people would agree with is that the phone is not been the best place to kind of do deep coding and research work. And I feel like it's really changed my ability to do that. Wait, I got to stop you. So you're using Grok voice mode. And is that specifically because it's built into your Tesla or using it in situations where you could also use, for example, ChadGBT voice mode? [06:13] No, I'm using it because it's way better than any of the other voice modes and I will fight anybody who says anything different. Okay. No, tell me, like, what is, what do you like about it? Why is it better? [06:22] To be fair, OpenAI launched their real-time API, which may or may not be baked into chat GPT voice now. It's not totally clear. But the old voice mode was based on 4.0, and I just found it to be completely unusable.

[06:40] And Gemini's voice mode I just didn't find to be smart enough. And I just found Grok's voice mode to be significantly smarter than anybody else's. I'm using... [06:51] Grok. [06:53] two, three, four. I don't even remember what, or whatever the latest, the latest one. Yeah. Yeah. But not the super, I don't have the most expensive account or heavy or whatever. I don't have super heavy. Um, but I just find it to be much better. It does tool calling way better than any of the other ones. That's, that's I found to be a major weakness of the voice models is that they don't do great tool calling and research. And, um, [07:13] uh grok steam steps all that so no even before it was loaded in my tesla um i dropped my daughter off at summer camp this summer up in new hampshire so i had a five-hour drive on my own and i spent like two hours researching and essentially like [07:27] working through a piece. Um, [07:30] And I did it by just like connecting it to Bluetooth and just sort of sitting there in the car. And, um, I found it to be by far the, uh, [07:39] the best of the voice modes. I hope [07:42] these other models catch up there because I would love more really good voice modes. I mean, I had a mind-blowing session this weekend and I'm giving a talk and I sort of have some ideas. I [07:56] transformers eating the world. And, um, so I was sort of catching myself up on self attention and exactly how it works. And, um, I did like an hour session and it really, I, I like was by far the sort of best, um,

[08:10] explanation I've ever read for it or ever heard, I guess. And so, yeah, I've just found it to be a kind of pretty extraordinary product. I do love voice mode for that. It's sort of like, [08:22] It's a podcast made specifically for you about whatever you're curious about. And that's really cool. I went up to, I drove upstate this weekend and I've been reading, I've been reading the Iliad. [08:35] And so I had her own audio book and then I had some questions as I was driving. And so I unfortunately use ChatGPT voice mode because I didn't know about Grok. So I wish that Grok's voice mode. So I wish that we'd had this conversation before then. But the thing about ChatGPT voice mode is, yeah, I think when it first came out, it was cool, but it just hasn't gotten as smart as the models are. And they gave it this new personality that I had to get used to where every time you ask it a question, it's good. It goes like, oh, yeah. [09:05] weird Gen Z thing that [09:07] it feels like it's has a little bit too much on we or something like doesn't actually care about you i don't know what that is so i had to get used to that rock has a stoner mode for what it's worth yeah uh [09:20] I will say the car version is very interesting to me. Like this was in the most recent Tesla release like a couple weeks ago. And, you know, I had been doing that same thing you did where you just plug your phone in and you put on Bluetooth and you, you know, do your best to make it work. And it's very interesting to just like have a voice AI button and it syncs back to your phone.

[09:42] regular grok but it you can't get you can't rejoin old chats so it's just like hey i it's just like but you know i mean these things are significantly better than siri and all of these other things and particularly i mean you know there's no comparison if you actually have something more than just a a single question you want an answer to right like if you actually want to have a conversation about the iliad or you know about [10:06] transformers and self-attention like, um, [10:09] I don't know, it's pretty amazing to just be able to sort of like hit this button and, and yeah, use that car time. I mean, I, I was on my way somewhere. [10:17] last week and I was, um, you know, I was like having it research, uh, I was going back to the, um, Walter Benjamin. I was, I was, I have this sort of idea to write a piece about, um, how, uh, [10:29] um, the reactions to every new technology are essentially elitist, um, critiques of it. And that, you know, it's always like, oh no, everybody's going to be able to like do this thing that only we used to be able to do. And so, um, I was in the car and I was thinking about this and so I had to go and I was like, okay, you know, I know it's been years since I read the Walter Benjamin, uh, mass production of images one. Yeah. Uh, yeah, that, that one. And, um, so yeah, then I'm having a conversation about that and I'm like, who were Walter Benjamin's contemporaries? [10:59] and then I'm like into all these, you know, and it's just like, [11:02] I don't know if that's a... [11:03] That's amazing. It's the best. [11:06] It's the best. Yeah, I don't know. [11:09] Okay. And so you're filling your brain with all these things from voice mode, which I love. But tell us about your second brain setup. I don't know how you refer to it, whether you think that second brain is appropriate for this, but I want to know how you're using Cloud Code to take notes and do research and all that kind of stuff.

[11:26] Yeah. So, um, uh, you know, I could just open it up. Maybe that's the easiest thing to walk you through it. I'll start on my computer and then we can do the phone. The computer is just a way easier, a way easier share here. So, um, [11:38] All right. So, um, [11:42] This is what I was working on before. [11:45] But essentially, this is just cloud code, and it's just sitting on top of my Obsidian. So if I jump out here and I just do... [11:56] You can see I'm following the para method, and I've just got everything organized in here and put in the places that they need to be. Let me just stop you for people who are listening. Okay, so we're looking at... [12:11] We're looking at cloud code. [12:12] It sounds, it seems like you have cloud code running in your obsidian vault and there's some kind of, uh, it's adding something to an existing, it looks like it's adding something to an existing note. Is that, that's what, that's what's going on. That's what we're looking at. Yeah. So in this particular one, I'm, I'm working on this talk. So I, I'm putting on my conference in two weeks. I'm giving this talk about marketing and AI and sort of what's going on. And, um, I'm, uh, uh, [12:38] If we sort of jump back a second, I've been doing these conferences called Brand, BRXND.AI, and they're about marketing and AI. And I did one in February in L.A. And my talk in L.A. was about this. I'm sure you've seen it was the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the CIA, wrote this manual called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

[13:08] sabotage the Nazi occupation. And so it was like, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff for blue collar workers. It's like, if you're a janitor, you should leave a bucket of oily waste around and accidentally drop a cigarette in there so that, you know, it will. But then there's this amazing... [13:27] set of recommendations for white-collar workers, and they're like, [13:31] Um, always refer things to committee, um, uh, always revisit previously made decisions. Um, make sure that like, if somebody is trying to make a decision, you should suggest that they don't act with too much haste, um, uh, less like we'd be embarrassed. And, and so it's like, um. [13:49] My talk was about how one hope I have is that AI can sidestep a lot of the bureaucracy that exists inside large organizations because it has this kind of... [14:05] uh goo-like effect where it can kind of fit into any crevice or crack because it can act as this fuzzy interface and it doesn't really care about the sort of input output um and so [14:16] The sort of next part of that story is I, after the conference, I realized that, um, uh, that manual was in the public domain. So I hired a designer and I printed 300 copies and I wrote a new forward for it. And so we're giving this away at the conference. And so my talk is sort of trying to tie all these ideas together. Right. So I'm, I'm trying to pull from the sabotage manual. And then I was doing a bunch of research into wild Bill Donovan, who started the OSS and the OSS was sort of the precursor to the, both the CIA and the, um, uh,

[14:46] uh, uh, special forces. And so anyway, I'm right. I'm writing this talk. And so I've got a project inside by obsidian, which is the beginning of the research for this project. And I'm pulling in sort of like chats and articles and all these things. And then I'm constantly kind of talking to the [15:03] the AI in here and giving it new ideas. So I'm like, Oh, I need some conclusions. Here's sort of my first thought on conclusions. And I'm having it like note down the conclusions. And then at the end of each day, I have the AI write up the changes that I sort of like the things I learned that day that are going to help me push this talk along. And so that's what you're looking at right here is sort of, this is all part of this. Yeah. [15:26] um, work that I've been doing where I've been feeding it. Um, I was working on sort of what are some of the conclusions I want it to be. And so this is all sitting in this, uh, this is all sitting in, in my obsidian inside a project specifically for that talk. Okay. So let me get a, a clearer sense of this. This is really interesting. So you have a project, uh, when you, when you have a new thing, you're, you're giving a talk, um, [15:51] You make a new folder. And then as you're thinking about stuff, you're working with Cloud Code inside of the folder, right? [16:00] And you're researching stuff and then saying, I want you to take notes on it. In this particular case, you know that a component of your talk is the conclusions section. And so there's one particular markdown file that you're just... [16:14] going back and forth with it and having it add conclusions. But what else is in that folder? So is it like there's a body note, and then there's an intro note? Or is it like-- So one of the big things here is that I'm in thinking mode, not writing mode yet. And so there's some stuff in here where I've specifically

[16:33] I think it's in the front matter, actually, where I've told Claude Code, like, don't help me write anything right now. And I generally find this to be a big thing with all these models is like, they immediately jump to wanting to help you with the... [16:46] artifact. And when you're just in thinking mode, you have to be very explicit in like, "Hey, I just want you to help me think and ask me questions." And so, yeah, what you can see here is there's a bunch of files in here. I've got chats. That's where I'm literally taking chats I'm having in other things. And I'm just using the Obsidian Web Clipper to pull the whole chat in. I've got daily progress. That's where I'm having the [17:11] AI actually like look through all the notes that came out that day and like help me think through the progress. And then I've got research. That's where I've got a bunch of like articles and PDFs and stuff that I've pulled in so far and been reading about. And then there's a bunch of other kind of random notes along here where I've been, you know, just using it to kind of help me. [17:29] um, think. And, and so, yeah, I was in the midst of, um, one, I've got this conclusion note. So, you know, I, I sort of felt like I had blocked out the big kind of, um, [17:40] the big themes of the talk but i was like okay i need to figure out what am i going to say at the end and you know essentially what i'm going to say at the end is about a lot of the stuff i've learned over the last few years of working with these large brands on ai projects and um so i was starting to get to the conclusions and so yeah i'm just kind of like trying i'm really piecing all this stuff together right now that's kind of what's happening and give me a sense of like when this folder was empty what did you start with

[18:05] Um, so I think I started with, um, the, the, I started with, uh, telling it like I'm in thinking mode. I'm not in writing mode. Um, here are my past few talks that I've given a brand to give you a sense of the sort of style that I have. And I, here's the kind of general idea and the big points I want to make, right? Like I'm giving away this book. So I want to talk about simple sabotage field manual. And I have this notion, like I have this, it's kind of just a title. [18:35] the very interesting things happening with these models is they're sort of, [18:38] displacing a whole bunch of specialized code in places. And so I sort of want to talk about that. And then I've got these conclusions. And so the first thing I said was like, hey, just go look through all of the rest of my, you know, probably 1500 things in my Obsidian and go see anything else you can find that might be of value to this talk of the existing things I have. And so just go kind [19:08] process. [19:09] Got it. And you're starting, are you starting Claude in this folder or are you starting it in your full Obsidian vault so that it can access all that stuff? [19:18] Um, no, I'm, so I'm starting it in the full obsidian vault. So like, if we, um, like this is coming, if I step out of here, right. Um, we're in the root directory. All this stuff is in the root directory. My obsidian, I get it. Um, and my obsidian setup is also like a little more intense for what it's worth because like, um, I've also realized like, um,

[19:39] you can add a package.json to add a bunch of custom code commands. [19:44] to your Obsidian that you can then run. And then you could use those code commands and slash commands and all of these other things. So there are a bunch of other moving pieces in here. But generally, it's a fairly straightforward... Got it. I mean, I'm trying to use para and some other bits and pieces. So for people who are listening or watching and are like, we just went through a bunch of stuff really fast. So the basic gist is Obsidian is just like a note-taker, a note-taking app that runs. It's all local. [20:14] take, they exist in essentially text files on your computer organized by folder. And when you're starting cloud code, one way to do it would be to start cloud code in the folder for the particular project that you have. But it sounds like what you're doing is instead you're starting in the root directory where all of your obsidian notes live. And the advantage of that is... [20:35] Cloud Code has some like sandboxing things where it's like, it's not really supposed to like run commands outside of the folder it was started in. It can run commands inside of any subfolder, but it sounds like what you're doing. So it has access to your entire obsidian. It can do a bunch of stuff. And you've also added a package.json, which lets it run, you know, custom software, custom software commands, basically. That's really, really interesting. Okay. And yeah. [21:02] Do you find, because I've sort of like had this as a twinkle in my eye to like have it go find relevant stuff for me. [21:08] Do you find that it's actually relevant and interesting? Because I think sometimes when I've done this kind of thing before with language models, there are like...

[21:15] oh yeah, this random thing is relevant because XYZ, it doesn't feel... I can understand why it picked it as being relevant. [21:24] But if it really knew who I am and like what I think is interesting, it definitely would not have. Do you find that that's the case or have you figured out a way to make it relevant? [21:54] we have only 15 full-time employees, but we have five or six businesses that we run internally. So we need to build a lot of websites all the time. That's what we use Framer for. Framer AI builds entire websites from a single prompt. Type modern SaaS landing page for a productivity app and watch it generate a structured site with a responsive layout, clean sections and pre-filled copy. After that, refine, style and publish. It's also really powerful. [22:17] You can create buttery smooth effects and micro interactions with just simple sliders. Do you need to reach a global audience? One click lets you translate your website, every page and every slug into any language. And when you're ready to launch, you just hit publish once. Behind the scenes, framework handles hosting, blazing fast load times and SEO optimization. This lets you own your entire journey from concept to live site. No developer required. Ready to make a site that looks hand coded without hiring a developer? [22:44] Launch your site for free at framer.com and use the code Dan to get your first month of pro on the house. Rules and restrictions may apply. And now back to the episode. I think by and large, yes, I agree with you. I think in this case, relevance is a little simpler since like ultimately relevance,

[23:00] this talk is sort of [23:02] The things I was asking it to look for, I've done a bunch of thinking and research around. So it's like I'm not asking it to make large conceptual leaps to relevance. It's like, go find all this. Like I want to talk about the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. It can literally just do a find for all the times, all the articles and things I've got in my Obsidian about that. And so relevance is... [23:28] Yeah, it's kind of a loaded term. Right. And I agree with I agree with what you're saying. I think this is what I'm asking it to do is much more simple, which is like amongst this set of things, go find all the notes that I've already researched that kind of brought me to be thinking about these things to begin with. [23:45] Got it. And then once you had to do all that research, did you have it do any sort of summary to like let you like sort of stimulate you to be like, OK, here are the here are some jumping off points based on what you've done before. What was your next step? So my next step is I actually have an agent in here. So if we go to continue for now. [24:06] So for people who are listening, you're just starting up Claude. You're using the continue flag. So you're starting Claude by continuing the last session that you were in. And Claude Code gives us the ability to do subagents. So those are little mini-Claude that you can spawn. I have a thinking partner one. A thinking partner subagent. Okay, how does that work? Yeah, and so this is the whole thing where I'm like, hey...

[24:30] You're a collaborative thinking partner specializing in helping people explore complex problems. Your role is to facilitate thinking and basically don't try to write the thing. And so after I had that initial set of things, I flipped to this and it's like, OK, let's get into a flow. Ask me the kinds of questions. Help me think through it. You know, this is also where I've got a chats folder in here. So it's like it's not just happening here. I was also having like a. [24:58] I've got a whole... [25:00] Uh, [25:01] Sorry, I'm just backing out. So like if we go into... [25:05] Thank you. [25:07] Thank you. [25:08] Mm-hmm. [25:10] Thank you. [25:11] If we go into chats, like these are a whole bunch of the chats that I had. Like with the interviewer? No, these are chats I was having with ChatGPT and Claude and Grok and all of these different things that I went and just grabbed the full transcript of. So, you know, I was also having all these other conversations. And then, you know, I'm specifically telling the interviewer, like, review all these other things. So actually, you know, I think the first one, there's one of these conversations is I originally had this idea about Transformers are eating the world. [25:41] The notion there is like, [25:43] You know, there was some research that came out, I think, a few months ago that they had found they were able to sort of outperform some specialized time series modeling models with transformers. And like, you know, I think there's really interesting stuff. You know, there's a story about Tesla removing 300,000 lines of code with a neural network. And, you know, I've just kind of got these bits and pieces.

[26:13] a thread in chat GPT or Claude and I, [26:17] I'll then save that somewhere. And then I'll just kind of keep coming back to it when I have more ideas. It's like, oh, here's another example of... [26:24] transformers doing something. And so one of these conversations is actually that thing from, you know, probably four or five months ago when that kind of idea initially came into my head, maybe when I saw the research about time series modeling or something. Really interesting. Okay. Okay. So let's, let's keep going. So you've got, you got the subagent and I actually, I want to like, just actually, I want to pause on that real quick, which is, I think this is a very common complaint that they just dive in and it's a common pattern [26:54] make a thinking agent. And I think Claude Code or Claude in general is probably the best one for this. So this is a thing that we faced with one of the apps that we've incubated called Spiral, which is an agentic ghostwriter. And I think, [27:09] I think we found, I found the same kind of thing when, when I was thinking about, okay, how does a good ghostwriter work? [27:16] They don't just like, you don't say, hey, I want you to write a blog post. And they're just like, cool, I made it. Here it is. Like a good ghostwriter is going to get to know you and really understand. You're going to work together to... [27:26] figure out what's in your head about it, but also shape what's in your head. It's not just, oh, I can see it and they need to get it out of you. You're actually making it together. And in order to do that, you have to have a really good interview process to uncover things. And that sounds like you've found that too. And I think that's really, really interesting and really important for people who are thinking about how do I get the best out of AI? Actually, stop for a second and

[27:54] Let it ask it to understand you first. Yeah. One of the things I say to a lot of people is just like, I think, partially because we call it generative, there's entirely too much focus on its ability to write and not enough focus on its ability to read. It's like its ability to read is incredible. Right. And I think, you know, arguably sort of like much more useful on a day to day basis. Like we produce artifacts far less frequently than we just like think about things. [28:24] So, yeah, I do this a lot. This is definitely a complaint I have about all the models. It's like, you know, even when you very specifically tell it not to [28:32] try to do your work. [28:33] it's still often still tries to do your work. And so you have to like, really, really be like, no, I said no. Like, I think actually if we look at, um, [28:42] So, yeah. [28:45] Here, critical. When Noah says he's just collecting source materials or I do not under any circumstances want you to try to write it, take this literally. Do not create outlines, drafts, or any versions of talks slash writing. Only gather and organize the requested materials. So good. I love it. [29:15] companies because obviously... [29:17] you know, like the sort of a lot of the economic input output is sort of measured in the artifacts that it produces. And so I think it's very oriented. And, you know, I suspect that part of it is just like that sort of the helpful assistant thing has like,

[29:33] come to be a sort of meme that is probably self-ingested. Um, but yeah, it's, it's, um, [29:40] I think for those of us who are trying to do more interesting things with these models, it becomes a real barrier to work. [29:48] Totally. Okay. So I want to think about when you're using the thinking agent, did you say it like it's, is it outputting some sort of summary of what you've come to into a particular place or? Yeah. So that thinking agent is sort of told to, as it asks me questions, kind of make notes about the questions that it's asking me and keep a kind of running log of what I'm uncovering and how I'm thinking about it and all those sorts of things. Got it. And then, you know, you come back the next day and you're like, oh, I just want to go [30:18] about this wild bill guy. [30:22] And that you start in a new chat, maybe with the sub-vision, maybe not. And that becomes its own new file on that topic. [30:29] Yeah, exactly. So like I, I, there's the, um, the wild bill stuff started as like deep research in chat GPT. Um, and I, you know, how to go out and I'm reading the wild bill book right now. There's a, like one sort of particularly famous biography of him. And, uh, um, you know, I'm kind of thinking about the bits and pieces and trying to make, and I think I made a kind of interesting connection

[30:59] he seems to have been after with the OSS and, and, you know, the sort of inspiration for the special forces was like empowering individuals. Um, you know, that's sort of like the theme of that, [31:10] manual was like, obviously... [31:12] empowering citizen saboteurs, but also, you know, I think a big part of the special forces is like, you know, having kind of like incredible operators at the edge who, you know, obviously operate within a sort of command and control hierarchy, but like have a ton of autonomy to... [31:27] move and execute independently because they're kind of, they have all the things that they need. And, um, so, you know, in all of that wild bill research, I kind of went back to this and I was like, is this like an interesting way to connect all these ideas that like, maybe kind of there's a, you know, and again, I'm, this is still early. I have not like solidified these conclusions as like, you know, the regular kind of writing process. Right. Um, but it's like, well, I think there's this idea that like, you know, fundamentally, well, I know, you know, fundamentally one of the [31:57] is it moved us from sequential based models to models that can act in, you know, sort of parallelize their work better. And that obviously allowed us to have much more powerful and, you know, interesting models and has, you know, arguably kicked off this entire sort of revolution of what's going on and, you know, what we both do for a living. And so, you know, I think there's this kind of interesting connection. And so that was what I was playing with, I think, here was like, oh, maybe there's this connection between kind of sequential processing. [32:27] to this kind of parallel. And then there's this connection to bureaucracy. And then there's this connection to Wild Bill, who seems to have been very much about sort of like working within a system, but like...

[32:38] having autonomy at the edges. And so that's kind of what I was playing with and just kind of taking notes. And then, yeah, I would jump out and be like, oh, well, actually I haven't figured out a conclusion yet. Let me start the conclusion section and I'll just sort of get that going on the side. But, um, and then, you know, I, I have a job, so I can't be doing this all the time. So it's also like you interrupt yourself and it's really nice to be able to come back and be like, you know, um, [33:01] Can you catch me up on the last three days of research? Ooh, I love that question. That's so cool. [33:12] And so, yeah, you can just kind of go in and be like, can you catch me up on the last few days of the research? And it's just going to go read all this stuff, right? And again, it's like... [33:20] I think the point you made earlier about the go find relevant sources, it's like, [33:25] I find a lot that the difference between... [33:29] The people are getting a lot of this right now. Part of it is just like you have a good feel for where the edges of the capabilities of these models are. And you sort of like encourage them to work within those capabilities. Like this is an incredibly easy, you know, it's like we know what it's going to do here. Right. Like I could write all these Unix commands. It's just going to go find a bunch of files in this directory and it's going to look at them by date. And it's going to look at all the files created in that project over the last year. You know, and we know it's going to be able to do that.

[33:59] breakthrough day was this idea of bureaucracy as positional encoding, which is very much a work in progress idea, but I kind of like it. But, you know, so it's just like, it's pretty amazing also to just be able to kind of revisit deep work like this, right? Where, you know, you know, you're going to break your flow. You're not, and it's like, it's often, you know, I find whether it's code or writing, the hardest part is like just picking it up again because you're out of it. [34:24] And so just to kind of like kickstart that process is sort of amazing. I think what I was playing with here is this idea that bureaucracy was actually like an innovation. Right. That like we look at bureaucracy as a negative and generally we talk about it as a negative. And I think often it is a negative. But, you know, I. [34:44] Bureaucracy was a sort of like huge innovation for how companies operate. Right. And ultimately, it sort of represents kind of hierarchy and structure and a whole bunch of things that are like actually like pretty. [34:56] positive for operating at a large scale. And so, you know, again, my kind of whole thesis on AI around all this bureaucracy stuff is that what's interesting about it is that, [35:09] as opposed to kind of past technologies, which kind of forced you to make a decision about whether you wanted to kind of like, [35:16] Use your existing... [35:18] sort of structure and build that technology into your existing structure or adopt the new structure. And most of the time, the new software required you adopted the new structure. And that's why so many sort of software projects failed for so long. At least that's sort of part of what I think. And, you know, I think part of what's interesting about AI, what I find so interesting is like that...

[35:39] you can kind of keep letting everybody work in whatever way they want. You know, it's like a classic problem inside large companies is like one team wants to use Asana and one wants to use Jira and one wants to use Linear, right? And so then at some point there's like a, there's a, there's a huge project and they bring in some big consulting firm and they decide they're going to all centralize on this one thing. And now two thirds of the company is unhappy. And like, they've all [36:09] I think was really interesting about AI, and this is a little more sort of theoretical because I think we're so early in this, is that like, [36:16] I think it's very possible you could just say, well, everybody just keep doing what you're doing. We're going to stick sort of some models in the middle. They don't care what you use because it's all just data structures to them. And so we can then have this sort of central thing. And when we talked about Percolate at the beginning, Percolate was a content marketing platform, worked with very large companies. So it was an enterprise software product. And it's like, at the end of the day, this is sort of the fundamental challenge of enterprise software is about adoption and change management. [36:46] Yeah. [36:47] I think and I hope, and again, this is sort of the optimist in me, that AI kind of lets us just not worry so much about these things. And rather than trying to make everybody change the ways that they work, kind of let them work in these ways and let AI sort of – I call it my Thomas's English muffin theory of AI, which is that it gets into the nooks and crannies. And so, yeah, so anyway, but I have no idea what bureaucracy is positional encoding means yet.

[37:17] the next two weeks before I have to give this talk. I think, no, but I think the point you just made is totally right. And it's actually not, it doesn't have to be theoretical. Like I've been seeing this too inside of every, and I've been meaning to write about it. And the place that it's been coming up is... [37:33] We have, so inside of every, we run like six different products and we have 15 people. So it's like a crazy product to headcount ratio. And what's interesting is I really like doing things in a bottom up way. So everyone, each of the products has its own stack. We're not like centralized into a particular stack. Each, you know, GM that runs a product like just has made a decision about do I run Rails or TypeScript or whatever. [38:00] Thank you. [38:00] And what I'm seeing happen, which is very cool, is... [38:06] A lot of the different products are running into similar things they want to solve for. So an easy example is we have one product called Sparkle, which is a little bit like a... [38:17] a finder replacement or spotlight replacement so it it organizes your files and then it implements really fast spotlight search i'm a user i like it okay so then you you know um and uh so that's really cool and uh agentic search coming soon uh check it out and uh and we're just building a new product [38:39] new GM, new stack, uh, called para, which is essentially an in-house counsel. So it's short for paralegal, not para, like, you know, Tiago Forte para. Um, and, uh, the whole job for para is just, you know,

[38:54] take all of your legal files and whenever I have a question and be like, okay, do we ever sign this contract or what's the employee agreement template or whatever? It just gives you the answer. And it's just a cloud code sitting on top of a directory. Um, [39:06] And a thing that we needed to implement for that is this sort of fast file search. And what's really interesting is, historically, if we wanted to reuse the stuff that we learned from implementing Sparkle's file search, that would have to be abstracted out into this modular library that anyone can use. And then we have to be on the same platform and all those things, right? [39:36] for, for, for, [39:37] for para right now we just added her to the sparkle repo and i was just like just ask cloud code to figure out how it works and just do your own version um and so you get this like sort of tacit code sharing where we all get better but without having to do the work of abstracting and modularizing everything because the the percentage of things that you can do that for are pretty low because it's a it's a heavy lift and i'm seeing that happen all the time where just having a bunch of repos that are all solving similar problems but in different environments in [40:07] is, you have [40:09] everyone gets more productive because AI can kind of translate. [40:12] I've, uh, one thing we've done there, uh, we also, we, so at Alephic, we do a whole bunch of building for, uh, very large brands. Um, and so we sort of build all kinds of AI things and, um, you know, so we, we've got lots of sort of internal and external repos and we frequently have the same thing. And actually I've used the GitHub MCP, um, a few times for that same purpose, which is just like, um, you know, you're just in cursor or cloud code or whatever.

[40:42] you go like look up, we run it, we've got an internal tool called intelligence that just sort of is a wrapper around a whole bunch of like stuff that we use. Right. So it's like got some CRM stuff and it's just like been a fun place to build the things that we need to run our company. But it's also a good place to kind of experiment and explore and figure out solutions to interesting problems. And so I'll frequently be like, oh, can you go to like, just go look at the intelligence [41:12] how I implemented that thing there and take those sort of best practices and just pull them over. And yeah, I think that stuff, again, that's where, [41:22] I really do believe in this. [41:24] idea. I like... [41:27] One of my, whenever we have like a client meeting or something, my first, the question, the icebreaker I always use is what was your aha moment with AI? And mine was... [41:39] I mean, [41:41] It was probably not the very first, but it's the one that sort of I think was most impactful was I was I got access to build a chat GPT plugin. Remember when plugins came out and like two and a half years ago or something now? You mean 50 years ago? 50 years ago. [41:59] And... [42:00] You know, I like you, I've written a lot of software in my life and I, you know, you know what you do when you like get access to something new. It's like I've got to go read the API docs and figure it out. And, you know, like there's going to be a contract. And, you know, as long as you follow that contract, it works. And I go read the plugin spec and it basically is like, oh, you just stick a manifest.json file in the root directory of your application. And in that, you describe how you want us to send you data and you describe how you're going to send it back to us.

[42:30] then we'll deal with the rest. And I was just like, [42:33] That's amazing. It's also like... [42:37] It's how the world should work. I wish everything worked that way. I wish I didn't always have to adhere to the big companies contract for how to send and receive data. [42:48] But also, like, the thing that really struck me in that moment, and it's, like, been my kind of, like, rallying cry around all this stuff is that it's also just, like, fundamentally counterintuitive in that, like... [42:58] I literally have a career's worth of intuition for how to, [43:01] integrate software systems, [43:03] And it flipped it on its head, like quite literally 180 degrees away from my intuition of how software systems should be integrated was this thing. And that, I think, since then has been my... [43:18] kind of thing for everybody has been like, this is just not intuitive for now. And, and that's not a bad thing. It just means like you need, [43:26] to build intuition. And like, that's what we're all just out there trying to do with it. Right. And so, you know, when, I don't know, I mean, part of what I like about what you're doing, [43:36] And, you know, even just hearing the things you're saying, but like generally what you do with the... [43:40] podcast and what you do with every is like so much of it is like we're all kind of just figuring stuff out for the first time. Right. And like, you know, we're like, oh, will this work? And then like all of a sudden you have this new bit of intuition for what these things can do and what a computer can. [43:55] that is not deterministic looks like and um [43:59] I think that's just what we're all doing all the time.

[44:02] And that's why it's so fun, I think. That's why I love this moment. Because you just have a weird idea and you're like... [44:09] has anyone done this before? And, and it's like, no, and it's not a, it's not a complicated idea. It's just, it's just a new, a whole new territory, you know? I, yes, I think about that all the time. And I think actually like, [44:23] I think one of the really damaging sort of things out there is that, [44:26] Um, [44:28] I think there are a lot of people who think we're way further along in this [44:31] than we are. And so, you know, I think particularly the people who are sort of scared, you know, we run, we work with like fortune [44:39] 50 companies. And so, you know, when we're sort of like out there and we're talking to people inside the organization, a lot of people feel like they've already been left behind, right? [44:48] And it's like, no, you can like literally go sign into ChatGPT and like, [44:53] Do something like nobody's thought about doing with this thing yet, because there's just so much white space to explore and you might discover some totally new way of using it and or like totally new trick. And I don't know, that's just... [45:08] And I think, to be fair to some people, that's sort of very intimidating. And I don't think [45:14] by and large, the models do any favors to themselves in helping those people get their feet wet in that, like, you know, I think people go on there and they, [45:22] You know, it's like you ask it to write you a poem and then it writes you a poem and you're like, OK, it wrote me a poem. But I. [45:28] I don't know, that feeling of like... [45:31] That feeling of, yeah, it's like being on the frontier, right? Totally. And yeah, I think that your point about intuitions and getting intuitions is the big thing. And I think people, what we don't realize is when you're dealing with something fundamentally new, you know,

[45:46] You can't trust how you reason about it without experiencing it because you have to build the intuition in order to be able to reason about what it means and how it fits in and whether it works or not. And we're just not used to that because we're used to... [46:00] reasoning about things we already have an intuition for and um and i think that's why like when you first see maybe when you first saw chat gpt you'd be like oh my god it can do everything like we're not gonna have jobs in a year and now we're like three years in and we're like yeah it's awesome and [46:15] Thank you. [46:16] Jobs are complicated. There's a lot of complex stuff that we do, you know? And I love kind of that, you know, in order to build the intuition, all you have to do is use it and that... [46:29] just by using it you're already kind of on the edge uh for now and yeah i think that's the best there's apparently there's a german word called finger spitz and fuel of course there is building fingertip feeling and that's been my um uh just because i can't resist also um i i i'm in that whole in in sort of the realm that you're discussing like uh [46:53] I've been trying to do a lot of analogy, analogizing, right. It's sort of like, and I think, you know, that's really hard. And, um, uh, you know, but my two that have sort of stuck the most, one is just, um, I watch a lot of YouTube with my kids and, um, uh, we watch this channel called Veritasium. It's a science channel and I love Veritasium. Yeah, it's great. Um, and he did one where he built a bike that locks out left. If you try to turn right and locks out,

[47:23] cleft. [47:23] unless you can turn it right, which none of us would think about when we ride a bike, because it's all just second nature and intuition. But it's also why you can't, [47:34] explain to a child how to ride a bike. They just have to get on it and feel it. And, and so, you know, I really, that video is amazing. And it's, that channel is amazing. And, and, but I've thought a lot about that. And then the other one, which is a sort of deeper cut is there's an amazing book about quantum physics called Beyond Weird by Philip Ball. And the thesis of the book is basically [48:04] that we have a very good understanding of it. We wouldn't be talking right now. We wouldn't be on computers. We wouldn't have phones if we didn't have a very good grasp of the mechanics that exist underneath it. And his thesis in the book essentially is that what's really lacking is the vocabulary because we all exist in a Newtonian world, not in a quantum one. And so we all have words that reflect the sort of deterministic processes of that macro universe. And I think a lot about that. [48:34] I have not fully been able to sort of pull that string all the way to AI, but I feel like there's a real connection there because I think that there's just something really weird about using probabilistic computers. We're not used to using things that you ask them the same question twice and they have different answers. That's very strange. I'm not used to writing code where you can tell the...

[48:56] larger company how you want them to send you data and they can just do it. These are not normal things that any of us have lived with in our lifetimes. And so, of course, it takes some time for us to adjust. I think so too. And I actually have a hope that language models, by becoming a standard way that we use computers, will create that vocabulary. [49:20] Um, because we actually are quite good at dealing with probabilistic, non-deterministic things like other humans. [49:29] Um, we've just grown up in a world where, um, [49:33] because of, you know, the enlightenment and the scientific revolution and, and the tools that came out of that are very much like deterministic. We've associated that with, uh, [49:44] how we see like that's how we see the world because of those tools in that language and uh there's a whole other part of the way that we see the world which is much more squishy and much more like vibes based that has been um i think deep deprioritized uh especially in western culture [50:00] that now that we have a tool that works that way, I think we'll be able to start seeing that again. And that's one of the beautiful things to me about language models is it opens up that whole world again. [50:10] Yes, I love it. I do want to go back to Cloud Code. [50:17] We should do the phone unless there are other things that you want to share on the computer. But the thing I want to do before we get there that's just on my mind right now is like you said, you watch this with your kids and I'm sort of curious.

[50:32] how, like, [50:33] What do your kids think about this and how are you dealing with it with your kids? Yeah, I love that question. So I've got a seven and a 10 year old. And obviously, like I'm pretty kind of deeply embedded in this stuff. And so I've sort of exposed them quite a bit to it. [50:50] Yeah. [50:51] you know, they don't, [50:53] Uh, so they will like occasionally use the sort of voice models and they have a pretty good understanding and we'll be in the car and just play games and ask questions with Grok and do those kinds of things. Um, this weekend, actually, for the first time, my 10 year old, um, uh, she was really eager to be every year. Um, uh, my. Uh. [51:13] wife and her sister and brother and mom and all the cousins that we all get together and we do Christmas together. And so it's too many presents to give to everybody. So we do a kind of like not secret secret Santa where everybody chooses one person. And my 10 year old really wanted to be the one who got to be the chooser. Um, and, uh, [51:33] I encouraged her to vibe code in app to do it. And so I just gave her my phone and V0 and... [51:42] Honestly, that was like so amazing to watch. Like, yeah. [51:46] Not just because it was so cool to see her do that and build it. And she went through it. She was having so much fun. She did 75 revs on V0. So she, like, really got it going. Polished Santa app. She also, like...

[52:03] started to get into like really interesting kind of like computer science ideas without knowing it. So in one of the things like the adults give presence to adults and the kids give presence to kids. But she wanted this to be a more generalized app. So she realized that like rather than having adults and kids, you need to call them groups. Right. And like, you know, so she's like getting into data modeling and like all of this. I'm like watching this conversation happen and. Yeah. [52:31] I just thought that was so awesome. And, you know, also just like, [52:36] a real pet beam of mine right now, and I've sort of gotten this argument with a bunch of people, is like there seems to be a big conversation that like there's a – [52:43] a bubble in vibe coding and like because one company or another might have too high of a valuation and [52:50] My take on that is like, I just, I could not care less what the valuations of these companies are. I think like fundamentally, if there's a tool that can allow a 10 year old to like build an app, there can't, that can't be a bubble. Like, I just like can't see a possibility where that is that. So anyway, that's sort of one side of it. The other big one for me that I've been thinking a lot about is... [53:13] Uh, [53:15] is sort of media literacy and education, um, stuff. So, um, you know, both at the sort of schools they go to, um, and then also I went to NYU and I've sort of, um, [53:27] been having more and more conversations with the Dean of the school I went to there. Um, and, uh, um,

[53:34] there's a lot of fear inside schools right now about AI and about cheating. And, um, there's a big thing, you know, so some parents in my town, they, you know, they wanted to have more of a conversation about it. And, um, [53:47] As someone who... [53:49] I've thought about this a lot, but I've also just like been, I've spent my entire life thinking about sort of technology and its effects on culture. And I think I'm like relatively grounded in these things of like, I've put in good hours of thinking. I mean, I know that for sure. And so, you know, my take on it is like one that sort of you can't hide technology completely. [54:08] that won't be hidden. Right. So it's like, you know, putting our head in the sand is not the best solution. And then, you know, my bigger one though, is like, I was out, um, a friend of mine asked me to come, um, talk to a school two years ago about AI, um, uh, out in LA. And, um, afterwards I was talking to a English teacher there and she was like, what do I do? Like, what do I do about all these kids? Um, yeah. [54:30] you know, using AI. And I was like, look, I don't really know what your job is because like, I mean, being an English teacher for 11th graders sounds really much harder than my job. Um, [54:40] But... [54:41] On a really fundamental level, I don't actually think your job is to teach these kids to write because that's like a lifelong pursuit. I think your job is to convince them that it's worth learning to write. And so in that way, I'm not sure that anything fundamentally changes because of AI. I think that, and again, this is my very optimistic take, but I am... [55:02] I think that there are so many parts of the education system that AI really just exposes the sort of flaws in the way that we teach. Like, why are there so many tests on these kinds of things instead of encouraging thinking and learning and coming to love to write and research and whatever? It's like, we're so focused on teaching kids the five paragraph essay, while every adult

[55:28] has long abandoned that. And because like, it's all about sort of discovering that you like to write and you, you know, what your own style is and how to do it. And, you know, it's like, I'm [55:39] a big part of working with AI to write is like telling it is ignoring it. Cause you're like, no, that's not me. I'm not into that. Like I, like I, I, I'm totally comfortable saying really here. I know you don't think it's a good idea, but like I'm cool with it. Um, and so, you know, I don't know. I, I've been sort of having a lot of these different thoughts. I'm actually pitching a class for the fall of 26 at NYU to kind of, um, the idea for it is, uh, [56:07] code is essay. And my, my sort of point of view is like this sort of opens up this new way to express yourself. Um, and that, you know, like, [56:17] We have all these other ways that we celebrate to express ourselves, but code has been like long shut off from people because it's, but actually it's kind of amazing. And it lets you express yourself in all these different kinds of ways. And like, you know, this is what my 10 year old was doing this weekend. So anyway, those are all the bits and pieces as a parent. I've been thinking about the one other thing I will plug is, um, [56:36] Media literacy, I think, is a big piece of it. A lot of people are afraid of these models and hallucinations. And there's a book by a guy named Tim Harford who writes for the FT and he's an economist. And he has a book called The Truth Detective, which is an adaptation of The Data Detective, but it's written for kids. And it's the best media literacy book I've ever read.

[56:58] for adults or for children. And I think a lot of what this AI conversation exposes is how [57:06] bad a job we do with helping and arming our kids [57:11] and our adults to be sort of like, [57:15] truly media and technology literate. And, you know, like being really good at knowing what's real on social media turns out to be also really useful for like, [57:24] differentiated between hallucinations and non-hallucinations in chat GBD, right? Like this is a sort of, to me, a kind of very central skill that like we need to arm [57:35] everybody with. And I am sort of way more interested in that with my kids than I am in worrying about them cheap. [57:42] That was a very long answer to your question. I don't know if it got at what you were looking for. No, it's amazing. [57:47] That's exactly what I'm looking for. And it's sort of what it strikes me. Another way to frame what you're saying is... [57:54] for example, rather than [57:57] Having them memorize and be quizzed on what the 50 states are, [58:03] uh, [58:04] Mm-hmm. [58:05] asking them to go find the 50 states with chat gbt and be able to tell when the ai is giving them the wrong answer because that's a lot more of the the meta skill that they're going to need anyway down the down the line and again [58:18] I'm not a teacher. I'm sure there's lots of teachers who are like, this is, that's crazy for a lot of probably good reasons, but there's something interesting there where it becomes, the meta skills become more important than they used to be. And in order to do well at the meta school, you have to also be able to like, to some degree, do the underlying skill too. But, um, we probably could be spending much more time in the meta school than we are now in the education system, like isn't really set up to do that anyway. Yeah. And I, I, you know, even, I think even

[58:48] at NYU and [58:50] When you graduate, you have to sort of, it's not quite a thesis defense, but you have to sort of spend three hours with four professors and, or three professors and sort of explain kind of your line of reasoning around why you studied what you studied. And you need to be prepared to kind of like weave into that defense any of 25 books that you put on your book list. And, you know, I was talking to them and it's like amazing. That's like entirely AI proof, right? [59:20] on that. Like you show up in that room and you're either prepared to speak to it or you're not. And [59:27] It doesn't mean anything, right? Like it's, it's like, like, do you, can you, can you make a, an argument that, [59:35] in this room. And like, not everything is going to be that easy to be sort of like cut off, but like, I don't know, there's something really beautiful about that idea, right? Because it's like, it's naturally cheating proof because like you're sitting there and it's a question of like, did you actually internalize these things? [59:52] Um, [59:53] And I don't know, that's way more interesting to me than even like, was your essay good or any of these other, it's like, did you, did you get it? Like, and so, yeah, I don't know. I'm, I'm. [1:00:08] I'm trying to do my best to kind of like, [1:00:11] um, take a balanced approach and, um, try to at least sort of like tamp down some of, I live in a small town in Connecticut and, you know, I think there's a lot of fear amongst parents, you know, it's like,

[1:00:24] it was mobile phones and then it was social media and now it's AI and it's like another thing that's going to ruin our kids. And I don't think that that is true. But I think there are things we can and should do to encourage it to not be true, like really get them really good at the things you're saying. Like, how do you tell? And again, it's like a hallucination is just a form of the same kind of misinformation that exists in on television and on the internet and in social [1:00:54] just sort of like encouraging people to kind of get in touch. There's a great part of the truth detective for the kids book. He calls it the brain guard. And like one of the bits of advice he has is when you encounter some piece of information, if it makes you feel really good, cause you agree with it, then you should be even more skeptical of it. And he calls it the brain guard, you know, and he's explaining this like this is for a nine year old. And I just thought that was like such a beautiful way to put it. Right. Like that's like what, [1:01:19] That's what you learn to do when you get good at it. [1:01:21] being on the internet, [1:01:23] is that you're like, wait, I should be more skeptical of this because this is in line with everything. I think let me just double check the way you get to learn that feeling in your gut and [1:01:35] get to learn when to react to it. And so, yeah, that's a lot of [1:01:39] how I think about it. [1:01:40] That's great. I'm, I'm interested. I'm going to get, I'm going to get that book. I'm interested in reading it. [1:01:45] You should. My plan is to read it to my kids every year from now on. Nice. I love it. Just refresh it. [1:01:52] All right. Now, for the moment we've all been waiting for, show us how you use Cloud Code on your phone as a second brain note taker. Okay. So here we go. So I am going into an app called Termius.

[1:02:07] Terminus is just a terminal. [1:02:10] Um, and, uh, what is allowing all this to happen behind the scenes is in my basement, [1:02:17] I have a mini PC. [1:02:20] And on that mini PC, I have a thing called TailScale running. And TailScale lets you set up these very simple VPNs. [1:02:29] So I'm currently inside. Like if I scroll down here, you see I'm on a VPN. That's my personal VPN. I'm not like on an outside VPN. So the only way to access this machine is through my VPN. [1:02:43] And so then when I go in there, because I sink my obsidian, I'm, [1:02:49] Um, [1:02:51] with Git. [1:02:54] So I put it, it's on GitHub, in private GitHub. I can then sync it back down to here. And so then I can just call up Claude. [1:03:03] And now I'm just in Claude code. [1:03:06] talking and thinking and I can just be like, um, [1:03:10] What's new in the last... [1:03:13] Two days. [1:03:16] Um, I can access any of my agents. Um, I can do anything. And again, this is in my obsidian, but I can use this. [1:03:24] anywhere, right? So I'll be like [1:03:27] on the fly. I've got other repos in here. I realized a link was broken on my [1:03:34] conference site. And so I, uh, um,

[1:03:38] I just opened the repo. I pulled it down. I [1:03:42] ask CloudCo to make the changes and I was able to do it right here. So this has been like completely wild to me because again, this is very much in that like, [1:03:53] like, [1:03:54] On Tuesday of this week, we had Monday off. Tuesday, I dropped the kids off the bus. And then I went and I sat and had breakfast. And I literally sat on my phone and worked on this talk for like, [1:04:06] two hours. And I did it through here, right? Like on my phone, where I was like doing real thinking and research and pulling things in and pasting things in and doing all this kinds of stuff. [1:04:18] And, you know, I'm able to do it all and it just, it, [1:04:22] doesn't, [1:04:23] seem like I could do that kind of thing without that. So yeah, this has been like a completely revolutionary change in my life. Um, and, uh, actually one of the things I've been doing lately is like setting up, I've got all these friends now who I've set up, um, like little partitions of this mini PC in my basement, um, so that they can also run club code on their phone because, um, I like it so much. Does this make you be like, Oh my God, I got to drop everything and just [1:04:53] that has cloud code as a backend for this? [1:04:56] No, I mean, actually, one of the things I've been thinking a lot is like, [1:05:00] Maybe I just like everything should just run in Linux all the time for me. Maybe this is like, at least for the short term, this is the answer to all of what I just need to like not have anything anywhere else. No, I mean, I'm I'm.

[1:05:12] I will say I'm sort of pretty out of the SaaS game these days, so I don't often kind of think that I should drop everything and do anything. I find this to be a really amazing solution. [1:05:22] And, uh, [1:05:24] But no, I mean, I... [1:05:26] But this is really... [1:05:28] this has really changed the way I work. And I feel like I can just be anywhere and just be on my phone. I was out. I needed a break. It was 4.30. I went and sat outside for a while. And then we had a project that needed to get delivered to a client. And a small change needed to be made that I was the best suited to make that change. And so I just hopped on my phone. I pulled the repo down and I went into Cloud Code. It was like a tiny little change. [1:05:58] The way I find myself using Cloud Code the most for code is that mostly I'm having it do the work I already know how to do. I'm like, oh, I knew exactly what was going on in that situation. I knew why we were having the issue we were having. And so I was like, I could have gone back to my computer and opened up Cursor and done it in Cursor either by hand or with Cursor. But I told Cloud Code exactly where to look. [1:06:28] was what I thought the problem was. And then I just had it push a solution and it pushed a PR and then I was done. [1:06:33] Amazing. And I was still sitting outside by the pond.

[1:06:38] I love that. Um, yeah, I've, I've definitely had that experience. I've never, I've not done it on my phone. I'm like, I have my laptop out with me, you know, by the pond or by a lake or whatever, but you're inspiring me. I have a Mac mini in the office that I've been meaning to set up. So I think this is going to be getting one of the other, by the way, um, [1:06:55] One of my other, I'll just take you out of here for one sec, actually, just to show you this. One of my other big ahas recently has been... [1:07:06] uh [1:07:07] building [1:07:09] clawed code helpers for doing [1:07:15] basically like [1:07:17] setup work. So it's like, I'm not, I'm like been playing with Linux lately. I'm playing with this Omarchi, which is [1:07:24] DHH's Linux distribution. And I'm not like super comfortable in here. And so I got this whole, this is a Cloud Code project specifically to help me configure this box. [1:07:35] Yeah. [1:07:35] And it's like so nice because I'm like, oh, how do you do this in Linux again? Or like, what's the Neo Vim command? Or like, can you change this? Can you help me install this plugin for Neo Vim or whatever it is? And so now I have one on my Mac too, where it's like, can you clean up all the homebrew things? Or like I switched from like which Python package manager I was using. And it was like, that would have been super overwhelming for me. And I was like, I want to switch from using... [1:07:58] pip to using UV. Can you just make that happen? And it just did all this stuff for me. And it knows all my preferred settings. And so I actually have a version of this where now I've got it so tuned that if I want to launch a new box for doing something, it'll just have all my settings ready to go. And then I can log into Claude Code and the Claude Code can then set up anything else that didn't get set up in the initial process.

[1:08:22] That is amazing. [1:08:23] That's wild. [1:08:26] Um, [1:08:26] This is my happy place. I can see that. Are you, do you have any, like, are there, are there any big projects like this that you've been itching to do or itching to try out? [1:08:36] Uh, no, not really. I mean, I've been having a ton of fun. My, my server stuff has been a ton of fun. I've been doing a lot of that. Um, I'm, uh, [1:08:45] Like I said, this is kind of a joke and kind of not. It's like I'm super interested in... [1:08:51] like doing more, because Cloud Code has become such a sort of integral part of my life. Like I'm very interested in the command line. I found myself installing more and more things into the command line and like doing more and more work. So I've been using like Simon Wilson has a LLM command line tool and like doing more and more stuff sort of in that. And then like also layering that back into Cloud Code. So it's like I did my newest Cloud Code. [1:09:18] little obsidian tool is it i have an attachments folder in obsidian where all the pdfs and images and stuff in any note go but inevitably they have terrible names right i mean um and so this goes through very similar to um uh sparkle and but just in that obsidian folder and it it renames them all and then it also puts them in like a metadata it puts them in a table in the attachments folder and

[1:09:48] So just like cleans everything up. It just does it through Gemini flash. And so it's like, I don't know, stuff like that's kind of amazing. So I don't, I'm just like, I'm having the time of my life just, [1:10:00] building and tinkering. And, you know, I mean, this is just on the side and I get to do the same thing. I mean, we work with like Amazon and Meta and PayPal and all these big companies and, you know, we're just like building amazing stuff all the time. [1:10:13] I love that. I love the energy. If people are interested in following you or working with you at Alephic, where should they find you? [1:10:22] Yeah. So Alephic is alephic.com, A-L-E-P-H-I-C.com. And then I also run this thing called brand, B-R-X-N-D.AI to make it particularly confusing. That's a conference. We've got the conference coming up on September 18th in New York City. You should come if you're around. It'll be really fun. We're going to talk about marketing and AI. [1:10:52] Those are kind of the... [1:10:53] best places to find me these days. [1:10:55] Awesome. Noah, always a pleasure. [1:10:58] Pleasure's all mine. Thank you, Dan.

[1:11:28] of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat. [1:11:32] craving for more. It's not just a show, it's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor, hit like, smash subscribe and strap in for the ride of your life. [1:11:45] And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.