The #1 Hack to Build Apps With AI Without Getting Stuck | Colin Matthews

this is a the technique that I just call reflection but basically what this is giving it all the information about what we want to build and then asking for a plan first before actually kicking off any type of coding here and the reason why is it's twofold so one is you'll get to see what is going to happen which you know allows you an opportunity to modify it right if there's something in here that you don't like you can change it and then two also you actually learn a little bit about what's happening by default these systems are built to a code and so if you ask a question it might just go try to fix it for you right like it's not necessarily going to wait and so saying don't write any code gives you that opportunity to read this and so it will do a better job even if I don't read this if I just ask it for the plan and then say go and I don't even look at it will still do a better job most of the time all right welcome everyone my guest today is Colin Matthews Colin is a rockstar instructor who has trained over a thousand PMS on how to become more Technical and he has an exciting new course out about how to prototype with AI so I'm really excited to talk to him about how to pick the right AI prototyping tool and how you can build app with AI in just like 30 minutes and we're going to do a live walkth through so you should be listening to this watching this on YouTube so you can see Colin screen share but anyway welcome Colin yeah great to hear thanks V all right so before we talk about

building the app let's talk about different types of AI prototyping tools you know there's like so many prototyping tools out there now and like how do I think about which one to use yeah great question so different tools are useful for different basically application Stacks or different parts of the product I actually have a little demo if I can share my screen here we'll just hop in and I'll share that right away if that sounds good yeah go for it okay cool so let me share and we'll take a look so yeah this is a little framework that i' worked on previously with Lenny in terms of choosing tooling so we grouped it into three main categories we have chat Bots kind of cloud development environments and then the local development assistance chat Bots are really only going to work on client side code one quick kind of clarification here is that any of these things can write code for any part of the stack so you know like chat gbt can write serers side code really what we're talking about here is the ease of use for you to go and use that code so you know you have to know what to do with that serers side code if chat GPT writes it for you and so with CLA or chat GPT you can basically write you know little front end applications but then when we move over into Cloud development environments you can see that you know we can do client side server side databases and also deploy onto the internet so this is where most people are going to want to sit and then finally we have things like cursor wind serve and so on that again they're going to write code for you but then you have to know what to do with that code right so you have to know how to run it on your own machine how to deploy it to the internet and all that good stuff so typically I recommend you know sticking to the middle here one of the options here but you know depends on what you're trying to do okay so let's talk about the middle a little bit more so you have vzero rep replate agent Bol and lovable yeah like what which one should I start with or like what are differences between yeah so they definitely do have some differences I'll start with let's say repet just because I think repet is probably the most unique of the set so replit can do everything that you might want to do in terms of you know writing your client side code writing your server side code actually hosting a production database for you so this is an important point that like none of the other ones if you want to store data in a database can do that by default and then also deploying just using repet they have their own deployment tooling replit also I have personally found like just playing around with it is the best at building more like datadriven applications so you can write applications using Python and libraries like streamlit which B basically help you build you know like an internal tool or you know visualization of data or dashboard stuff like that I found rev to be really great for bolt I've personally found that bolt is the most flexible so there's really no like there's some strong defaults but you can get around them pretty easily and that's actually really nice sometimes I'll show you an example of that later on where sometimes we actually don't want the defaults and it's pretty easy to help Bol not to use them and to get what we want instead and then loveable is kind of like an inter intermediate one to be honest it doesn't have a code editor and you're going to see the importance of a code editor a little bit later on actually think even if you're not technical having the code editor is pretty important but it does have some nice Integrations so like you can connect to superbase GitHub push your code out or deploy automatically okay so if I want to build like both server and client I should just start with VZ Bol or R something yeah exactly so if you want client and server then you know one of the options down below so V bolt lovable or replit that'll get you both of these here and for a lot of applications you're definitely going to want both a client and a server and then finally like we talked to it for storage if you want to store data in a database you know replic gives you that by default so it's really easy or you have to integrate with an external tool as you're using one of these other ones in order to get that database and what are

some of like some personal apps or things that you built that are actually useful through a AI you know they have like some examples I built like two things that I use on a weekly basis and then some own some tooling to solve my own problems as it relates to teaching so two tools that I built I actually don't know if you ever run into this is with substack I could never get the images to fit correctly like there's a default size that it tells you should use but then my images are always cropped in correctly and so I built a tool with repet that I can upload an image and it basically resizes it so that it will fit correctly with substack it just resizes my images for me and so it's nice because I don't have to think about like aspect ratios or anything when I'm creating the image I just throw it into the tool afterwards and then it resizes it for me so that's one the other one is actually a gif basically converter so I was having a lot of problems with getting gift to load into suback there's like file size limits and the online converters that I found they would all output files that were massive in size even like Adobes was not very good from my opinion and so I went and I built my own where like I could control you know the file size the the duration I could do like trimming and stuff like that so basically my own little tool for creating gifts and you could actually buy something like this if you wanted to instead like you can spend you know some you know amount per month or 25 bucks one time or you can just build it yourself in like 20 minutes with repet so those are two good examples nice yeah like I I don't know why substack wants to have a different ratio with like the social share Ray shows is like super annoying yeah and I've just kind of give up I do figma but yeah it's really cool that you build a tool to it's interesting because like I think AI is really good at solving like very specific problems like a simple Tut to solve a very specific problem yeah you know yeah I agree and for that specific one I even added some features where like it detects the background color and then when you when it gets the correct aspect ratio it adds the Border in that background color yeah like it maintains the image as it would appear but that's some of the stuff that you can just like ask or repli in this case to do that and you know it'll figure it out I didn't tell it like what how to implement that right like another really strong use case especially for PMS is you know like the designer will put together some sort of figma mock right and then usually what you want to do is you want to explore like multiple different mocks or multiple different options so I found that using these tools like before I would just get some feedback to designer like some text feedback but now I can actually just like paste the mock into Ai and be like hey you know can you give me some other options what about putting this here or like what about doing that and then you'll create a bunch of different prototypes yeah and I'm not sure if that offensive designer but it makes it much more easier to share my ideas visually and then the designer can continue to integrate and make it better yeah I 100% agree actually there's a topic um that I like to talk about which is building a prototype Library so you can actually just take a screenshot of your application and rebuild it inside of one of these tools yeah and then create continue to create copies for different ideas so like let's say you're you know you're the pm at I don't know Reddit you at one point and then you wanted to like prototype a gen feature you could build a really quick mock of Reddit and then continue to go back to that so you don't have to redo that work and just create a copy and then prototype like your gen feature prototype you know some changes to you know comments or something like that and interactive experience yeah that interactivity really brings into life and also it's actually also really amazing at like running product copy right to like make it more concise and more clear and stuff yeah exactly yeah the cool thing about these tools which you know maybe isn't always clear to folks is that behind the scenes it's mostly it's using CLA the 3. 5 it could be using different models as well but you can ask it to do things like inside of bolt that are just general like chat gbt ask requests in that context and it will actually do a decent job right so you can ask it to like rewrite the copy of your landing page you don't have to pull that out necessarily to Claud to do that makes sense that makes sense yeah all right man well let's get

into it let's actually try to build something with AI with all his imperfections so what should we build today Colin yeah so we're going to build a to-do app I kind of have some quick little mocks over here if there's any designers listening sorry about that but this is my little you know New Year 2025 habit tracking app so I'm going to walk through a little bit about the design you'll see the workflow that I walk through as well and then I did write the prompt at the beginning just so you know we'll save a little bit time but I'll explain you know why I wrote it the way I wrote it and then we'll continue to iterate on this over time so yeah just to go over the actual features here really quick it's pretty sure straightforward we basically can store habits and then also Market we completed those habits so you can see you know we have on January 17th I have three habits and you know I have these streaks because I've completed the habits over time have the ability to add a new habit and then over on the right hand side this will be a detail View for the habits so we be able to see you know for running which days I completed it and then which days I didn't right in the kind of in the past or in the future and that's pretty much it so just these two screens one like kind of main screen and then one detail screen on the right hand side yeah this great are you sure you're not the designer because it looks great yeah it's not a bad actually this is a funny thing if you are planning on doing something like this I'd recommend doing a low five mock you can include it in the prompt and it just one it helps you think about it right like and you'll see this throughout that being more specific is always better so in order to be specific you have to kind of know what you want right so doing these types of mocks or thinking about a little bit ahead of time goes a long way in terms of getting better results makes sense and yeah we'll just run through this prompt really quick I'll paste it over into bolt actually you know what let's do that first I'll paste and then explain it as it's working on it so it'll take it a little bit so I'm going to grab that I'm also going to grab this and just copy this to my clipboard and paste it in and you can see you know basically follows what we just said so yeah the prompt here I want to build a habit tracking app and should complete or should allow me scroll back up should allow me to enter new habits Mark if I completed the habit and then show me a streak of how many days in a row I've completed the Habit from the current date to the past and you can see I'm pretty specific about the interface here so I say C the date at the top with left and right navig a to change the date each track completion of the Habit should be associated with a date and habits can be complete or incomplete on each date so I'm both describing the user interface as well as a little bit about how data should be stored um I then tell it that in the future I'm going to add a calendar view and I want to ensure that the data model is compatible with this and then the final thing here is to create a plan for the implementation starting with the data model and not write any code so this is a the technique that I just call reflection but basically what this is giving it all the information about what we want to build and then asking for a plan first before actually kicking off you know any type of coding here and the reason why is it's twofold so one is you'll get to see what is going to happen which you know allows you an opportunity to modify it right if there's something in here that you don't like you can change it and then two also I actually learn a little bit about what's happening like when we talk about you know building these products or building these prototypes you having some familiarity like a little bit of technical knowledge actually goes a long way in terms of your ability to navigate these systems yeah this is very smart like most people just like as start coding right away but this is really good strategy yeah so you can see we have our data model right so this describes that we have a habit The Habit is going to have a name

when it was created we also track habit completions and then there's this little um helper here to with habit streaks it tells us how it's going to organize the files and just to reiterate like if we were in Claud right now this wouldn't exist because we can only have a single file so there would be no kind of component structure at all and then it also tells us a little bit about you know how it's planning on implementing this feature right so we can go through all this the key functions and so on and so i' recommend like especially if you're getting started with this to actually read through this think about it and if you want to make a change then ask for a change at this point rather than kicking off um the actual development but here we can just say you know I'll go ahead and get started or please Implement is usually what I write and is a data model for this app just like locally or is it like stored somewhere else yeah so right now this is just going to be local so basically within the front endend here but the nice part about this is that later on if we wanted to we could connect a database and then basically mimic that same data model it's easier to make modifications to the data model here than it is after we've connected the database it's harder to make database modifications later got it and you should go ahead and ask do it but like why did you decide why did you ask to start the data model first is yeah so the data model this is where most of the problems that you're going to have come from when we talk about issues with these tools so we know that we need to store data on habits and if we just kick it off and say like hey build me a habit tracking app and I'm not really explicit about what I want it's going to store that data let's say missing some data elements so maybe it doesn't store the date right it just stores like the Habit name whether we completed or not and it's not storing the date or tracking of the completions and so later on when we have an issue or when we want to add the calendar view we don't have any calendar dates to display we never set it up we never stored those calendar dates and so we're going have to go back and say hey actually now I want to add dates and you it's a little bit more challenging to change the data model that later on than it is at the beginning so like trying to nail the data model first is really good that makes sense yeah it looks like it ran into a bug yeah this is actually perfect so you're going to see this a lot uh this is kind of the second part of navigating these systems is that you're going to have issues as we go along and learning to read a little bit about these issues is helpful you can also just ask it like I'll just demo that right here so let's say I have not understanding what this issue is I can just throw this in and say you know please explain this to me yeah and then again don't write any code and the part is important because by default these systems are built to write code and so if you ask a question it might just go try to fix it for you right like it's not necessarily going to wait and so saying don't write any code it gives you that opportunity to read this and so we can say there's a syntax error incomplete function so I'll say you know please fix this we'll see what it comes up with and yeah one other thing just while we're waiting here is well I can continue here is this is part of the reason I actually like having a code editor that's visible to us because now I can actually go and look at the problem so this is telling me that there's a problem in app. TSX with something here so let me see if I can find the issue quickly let's see unexpected token so one other strategy by the way I can't find the issue right away it says that there's a missing close bracket but I actually don't see anywhere so I'm going to say another strategy here which is please determine the possible issues and again don't write any code and I'll copy and paste that issue one more time here you're very nice to it I just asked you to like fix this yeah I just have it I guess oh and there we go so I actually don't know if there was an extra issue that it maybe just didn't load properly a second time there I don't think it actually changeed anything and we would have seen like if there was actually an issue here we would have been able to spot that I think so yeah I think we're good there is just didn't refresh properly afterwards but anyway so we have our initial kind of mock here right so we have the ability to add a habit we click add and then you know we can mark it off one day streak if we go to the next day we're on two day streak and then let's skip we're back to one so you kind of you know basically followed that initial design that we had right yep cool yeah any questions I guess on what we covered tour I can continue details I think there's like another best practice here like you actually had two mocks right like you had a counter View and just add a have a view so you could have just asked to do the whole thing at once but like it sounds like you Tred compart a little bit more yeah exactly so in terms of implementing like the actual views definitely split it up even just generally features this kind of is the opposite advice as typical prompting usually with prompting you want to give like as much context you know have like the very long prompt right at the beginning what I found is that it's the opposite for this you want to take a more iterative approach the only thing you do really want to nail at the beginning is that data model because it's going to be shared across prompts like you're going to store data the same way but then beyond that you want to take that approach and make one change after another as you go along okay so should we do the counter thing now yeah so we'll go ahead and grab this as well throw this in here and then we'll basically just write up a prompt that says please implement this as a detail View and we'll be a little bit specific about what we want so we'll say detail view for a habit it should appear when a habit is selected and then we will want so say that header has the Habit name left and right nav switches between habits the calendar at default to the current month and can be switched with left and right have let's see if I missed anything here I think I got everything um oh yeah use the existing data model to track Abit completion and then again I'm going to ask it to not write any code here so I'm going to say how would you implement this and then don't write any code and again I'm doing this for the same purpose one is to give me an opportunity to see what the plan is and then the second is to actually have a plan in general right and once again like if you just jump right into the code most of the time there isn't a plan and so it will do a better job even if I don't read this if I just ask it for the plan and then say go and I don't even look at it will still do a better job most of the time yeah it's like a Chain of Thought right you wanted to think first yeah exactly so overall we're going to have let's see component structure if you're not technical we'll just kind of skip through this side is want to make sure that yeah data flow so add to Habit context selected habit we have a calendar view our navigation update the Habit list to make habits clickable and so on so again I recommend reading through this in kind of full detail if you're working on it for the first time but just go ahead and kick off on notation and see how that goes yeah I think that's great I usually add it to

explain what it did after it writes the code but I think this is like a lot better because you know now I can actually think first yeah yeah and one of the biggest problems I found with using these tools is that you end up in a place that's very difficult to get back out of right like yes it starts making is a mistake and then it kind of like doubles down on that mistake and it's just very difficult to move away so as much as possible you want to try to guide it towards the correct action the first time right rather than you know try trying to undo stuff later on okay let let's hope this works yeah I mean there there's like a 50-50 chance that there's an error but you know obviously if there's an error we'll be able to sort that out as well and I guess for the audience one interesting thing if you want to try this is do this yourself as well but maybe like try this without some of the tactics we talked about or strategies and then try it again with those strategies and just check out the difference because there is a massive difference between the two so we have a couple of errors here again this is going to be a common occurrence there nothing that to worry about too much you basically have two options here you can either just click attempt fix or again you know ask it to explain it so what I'm going to do is actually ask it to explain the issue and this particular issue I already know that if I had clicked just fix it probably would have fixed it it's an import error so it's telling us that you know we basically wrote some code that isn't being imported in the correct other location and so we just need to fix that import so I'm just going to say yeah please fix and it'll fix the import but yeah that type of issue like you'll learn over time types of issues as well that one probably could have been fixed quicker than if I just clicked the button Buton but it's just good practice to follow that pattern all right so let's see what we got here we have the basically the same issue so if I scroll back up you'll see looks very similar use habits is not defined now we have select change date is not defined so just the same problem I'm going to click temp fix this time we'll see where we land and yeah once again like sometimes you'll have these types of problems as you're working through this and other times it just works perfectly the first time when it it makes it feel like magic um which makes the other times feel worse but you know that's just how it works so we have you know our calendar view here let's see if I can go back we refresh do test I think we lost some ability to check off the Habit there yeah so this is another type of issue that you can sometimes end up with usually oh there you go so it's actually just it's a very small UI element and this is another thing to kind of clarify is don't be too about like trying to you know yell at the robot to get it to fix it because this looks like a really big problem it's actually a really small problem so when we click on this element like this box it opens this view right and then if we go back to Second here which one's the back to list if we click correctly on this little box it actually does check it off it's just that the containers are incorrect and what I mean by that is this overall container is surrounding this checkbox and so it's also going to the detail view so it's not as bad as it seems right everything actually works correctly other than that one small thing so again like being a little bit patient trying to figure out what the issues are goes a long way so we'll get that fixed as well which is let's say can you make it so that selecting The Habit name opens the detail view in that habit list rather than the entire container and hopefully that just fixes the problem for us the detail VI habit s the calendar right yeah so exactly that's like that's the calendar view and you can actually use these names like if you know get a little bit familiar so that the Habit list is the list of habits and so that's what I specified it should change is when I click on test you can see now there's a hover right so it brings us in here and hopefully when I click on the check you just get the normal behavior so there you go so that all looks good so I can check these off and when I click on test we should see that they're checked off in here as well how do you go back on a change like I want to revert the last step like how do you yeah this actually pretty straightforward most of the times there sometimes is an undo button it depends on the tool right so in Bolt there's an undo button and then also there's roll back to checkpoint so you can roll back further like let's say we want to go all the way back to here got it got it back I definitely would not recommend asking it to undo something because it's just gonna make up more stuff so you can I'll use undo a roll back okay so now let's so this is looking pretty good but now let's there's some like alignment issues like you know that I thing is too big sure yeah so we want yeah we could clean up some of this right so like let's go back actually let's start with maybe this should be aligned fully right so let's go and say actually I'm going to take a screenshot here and just to kind of mix up our different techniques here and say please align the Habit list with the create a habit for and hopefully that works for us here to match the width ah awesome there you go and yeah actually this is another good thing so you'll see that every single time like I'm losing my habit right yeah the reason why is because it's only storing it directly Within the application so when we're talking about storage we could store it externally like on a server or more likely in a database we can also get some permanent storage just within here if we use local storage so I can say please store habits with local storage and that's going to store it it's going to save it to the browser now and so it'll basically help us not lose our habits every single time um and this is fine for like small applications you can just use local storage and it'll save that for you rather than like actually connecting to a database yeah

so like having some like technical y knowledge is good right because you know like if I didn't know what the hell local storage was I would just be like hey why is my stuff disappearing yeah exactly so yeah I think it's like you know probably be like 20% technical right because you need a little that knowledge to navigate a lot of it also is just things that you can pick up or learn over time right so now that you know build local storage you can just like hey use local storage it doesn't have to be anything more complex than that okay and how about we make the scene look a little bit better like have you tried pasting some sort of design system or like some other app and it's like hey make it look like this yeah you could do something like that we can also say like you know please modify this to look like Netflix which I mean it's not going to be the best looking app for a to-do list and then again we could say like what styling changes would you make don't write any code and again like this whole like reflection or Chain of Thought component is one of the best ways to get actually good results because if I just asked it to look like Netflix it would change a bunch of stuff that probably we don't actually want it to change right so let's see what we got here we have layout changes typography and so on so I'm just going to kick this off we'll see what it does normally I would actually read through it and say like actually I only want styling changes I don't want any layout changes or something like that but we'll see kind of how it does here with this okay I see yeah and then while it's working through that I just I'll highlight two other quick things so one is I actually in Bolt right now have this feature turned on called diffs so diffs basically rather than rewriting the entire file it only changes a subset of the code right and you can actually see that happening in the background where it's not rewriting the file from scratch it's just changing what it needs to change diffs are great because it's less likely to lose or override things that you want to keep which is one of the main problems is like you all this work and then you ask for something else and it overwrites it then you lose a bunch of work and then also it use uses less tokens so you can actually get more done with you know if you're paying for this because you have to you know pay for 10 million tokens or whatever it might be oh so by default it would not it would just rewrite the whole file yeah exactly it rewrites the whole file that's terrible yeah and then yeah so now we have our Netflix inspired to theal list here which I think actually did a pretty decent job in terms of styling good yeah matching Netflix here okay and how do I deploy this thing or is already deployed yeah so in terms of deployment again depends on the tool like what the tools are available to so you can see up in the top right we can just click deploy and it'll deploy it over to netlify so netlify is an external hosting product and we we'll try it again because we got an error there on the deployment and yeah so put nli you can set up a netlify account create a URL so could put this at you know custom endpoint or custom URL if we want to call it like Netflix tasks. com or something and then share that with users and just like a regular application and then you can also connect to superbase so this is for you know if you do want to have a data relase or you want to have you know more server side functionality or background jobs or something like that then you can connect to superbase it's going to make it more complex your application and then like also your prototypes so I wouldn't recommend doing that unless you you're building a real app okay but that link is now available to you and other people right yeah anyone can come to this link and use this habit tracker and yeah pretty easy to build right yeah you should monetize this thing yeah and you keep going obviously like you could build you know like I don't know different task frequencies or habit frequencies right it so doesn't have to be daily or some analytics or like a dashboard or something like that all that good stuff if I wanted to what I'm do is like live but if I wanted to like ask my API of like you knowbe show the current weather or like show something like can I just ask B to do it yeah you definitely can it's a little bit more challenging you have to know how to interfere with that API right so you probably need an API key you have to like basically walk through what does the payload look like so what data are you sending and then what's the response look like and then how do you want to integrate that data so it's a little bit more challenging I think but you can definitely do it for sure got it okay and let's talk a little

bit more about the 70% problem right we like that has been like the most frustrating part of doing this from my experience just like you know like I said I guess 70% of way there and then it has to fix some bugs and then it fixes makes some more bugs and it keeps going yeah so let's just recap some of the strategies to not have that happen yeah sure yeah so the main ones are basically well first of all think about what you want ahead of time you know do a little bit of pre-work you can even like try to think a little bit about the data model if you want in terms of how you want to store data make sure that you nail the data model as early as possible and then when you're working through those prompts you know use you reflection or Chain of Thought to make sure that you're correct you know working on the correct things or fixing the correct issues and then yeah make sure you're taking an itative approach don't try to do everything at one time like take kind of small batches as you go along and then the last one is just be super specific like the more specific it can be the better result you'll have even to the point of you know I kind of mentioned this before but you can mention specific file names right say hey change this thing within habit list and that'll help navigate to the Crut basically fix for that problem whatever problem you have you ever tried using like U like a 01 or some more complicated model to try to like if this one can fix his own bugs another model I've definitely pasted it out and sometimes it'll have you better Solutions you know more context but I the workf flow is not great right now for a lot of that stuff especially because some of the models are very slow so I've personally found that using these strategies Works let's say as well but you know is a lot faster in terms of the workflow got it yeah okay so what are some other ways since you also teach a class on becoming more technical right like other than getting into AI to just explain what's gonna do which I think is very useful

like how do you actually learn how to program through this experience is that like a go I would say like so if we just flip back over to this little view over here for a second a lot of being better at this type of stuff is not actually about learning how to code but it's a learning how to think about the systems right so yeah even if we just go back to the question like what's the difference between these different tools they all seem the same well now we know that like Claude isn't going to build one file for us and we just saw some of the advantages of having lots of different files right because we can split up the logic so you know if we want more than one file we're going to use you know bolt if we want a server we want a database like we can think about those different tools and when you're actually building these applications understanding what the code is trying to do so like when is it trying to connect to a server when is it actually writing the serers side code you know how is it connecting the database what is the data model how is data being stored that that's basically what you need to know the actual coding part you don't have to be good at that at all because you know it can do a pretty good job with that you just have to be able to direct it to be like oh actually you know you made this mistake on the server or you know we need to clean up the client side to use the new data elements or you know we added a new data model new data elements to our database but they're not exposed on the server like yeah is we understanding those types of interactions between the system that'll help a lot more than learning how to code necessarily yeah I love that yeah maybe some someday I be smart enough to realize which part of the app you should face but yeah I think that's and like this St doesn't take too much work to understand right like you know server client database no it's really not that complicated especially for stuff like this like if we're in an Enterprise setting things a lot more complicated than what we have here but for regular products that we're building with bolt or something like that then this is really as complicated as it gets it's just these three things okay you know authentication and stuff like that that's about it so it looks like just to wrap up like it looks like both do quite a lot like so like why would I use like cursor or like some of these more aass tools yeah so I think cursor is best used for people who are using were working on their own product externally like they didn't start it in Bolt they maybe they've been working on it for a while and or they are professional developers who want to be basically using their existing workflows because you know bolt doesn't connect to GitHub right now it doesn't really like you can't make very small specific changes you can't deploy with your existing infrastructure so like you're a professional developer working at a company you probably don't want to start using bolt you want to use cursor which is just like you know code editor and still get the advantages of using AI without having to you know flip over like all your tooling your whole stack using bolt right yeah that makes sense yeah I think so sorry just WRA up there yeah for most PMS I think you know this kind of middle layer here is definitely the place to be rather than you know cursor and stuff like that got it and just to wrap up like so if I'm just a you know PM right now like you know I don't stuff and like I'm just doing like the waterfall development process of my designer and my Engineers yeah like I'm just like cross functionally aligning people at work like how do I like give me like the three step plan to actually build stuff myself or like actually contribute more to work than scheduling me eatings sure yeah oh I mean I think there's probably some cultural aspects there that can make it challenging but I'd recommend the first thing is like in this context is to build something super basic and then start prototyping features for your product so I'm sure you have some ideas about like how your product can be better learn how to like build up a very simple view of like you know LinkedIn or Reddit or something like that using bolt and then you know Addam mock generative ey feature Addam mock whatever and use that for the purpose of communication and just kind of see how it goes like work with your designers you know talk show those prototypes to customers you can get in front of customers and yeah see how that goes in terms of just communicating your ideas and I personally think that like it'll be easier to do that than necessar like convince a bunch of people to invest in something without them being able to see it right I think that's one of the main benefits of this is you can actually show them what they're going to get ahead of time yeah I think that's and like I think the key thing here is like you should like most people are PMA existing prod right so you should basically like take a screenshot of existing product or like get a mock from the designer and paste that into bolt or something and be like can you add this one little feature for me right yeah exactly yeah rather yeah I mean what we did today is definitely cool like you can build you know these applications but for most PMS it's probably going to be prototyping on top of some of existing design yeah okay awesome dude this is awesome and okay let's talk about your AI prototyping course like we just covered this what else are you going to cover in the course go a bit deeper yeah the course is a mixture of like prompting techniques so some of the things we talked about today as well as technical foundation so I'm not just talking about like how to use these tools like you know if here copy and paste my prompt I I'm more teaching you like how to think about how these systems work you know how to trouble do your own troubleshooting how to write your own prompts so that you can learn how to do this yourself and then it obviously is bent towards PM so a lot of the exercises or projects are about you know building a prototype to match a PD or building your own prompt library or prototype Library so that you can learn how to actually prototype on top of existing designs so a lot of that type of work and as I mentioned you know learning how some of these things work behind the scenes like those a little bit of those technical foundations that I think you need to do a good job here I feel like I wonder how change the daily life of PMS right like because right now like you know my Pras are like you know you got to have a problem statement to go yeah right you got have and like in the requirements I try not be too prescriptive right because like the designer wants flexibility on what this will look like and like so on and so forth but like this is like very different you know there there's no goals or anything just build it right I mean I think in some ways that's a good thing because you know we spend a lot of time on some of those things and then you know they don't always work anyway right yeah like you can spend a bunch of time on a great PRD a great design and then the user ends up not caring at all about the feature so I think getting like prototype it get in the hands of a customer and see if they care and then you know maybe you know figure out what the Perfect Design is after that exactly dud like you know like you got like I really believe that game has the customers as soon as POS possible like if the quality is not good maybe just like a couple customers at least sure give some feedback yeah cuz like you save so much time like cuz like most common video points how many people don't want so yeah exactly and you're not going to figure that out in the PRD most of the time right like or talking to the designer engineer you're if I align all the exacts then it's gonna work for sure yeah right yeah so yeah I think I mean and this like obviously we're talking about product here I think you know argue that design could take the same approach right if they have this skill like Prototype at first get in front of customers I think that's the important part um I think who does it part is less important yeah I mean I think the roles are going to be like Tal that be collapsed right like you know in some ways we did some design here in some ways maybe it's actually easier for designers to become PMS than for me to actually learn proper design you know system and stuff but yeah there's definitely a big difference between like what we did today and like you know companies like Airbnb who have a very specific design philosophy yeah right so there's that's still going to be in place but for like the you know 607 70% of like just testing an idea I think you can do a lot of it with the tooling we talked about today okay so last question call well two more questions what is the like if someone takes a course or like someone learns this protype of stuff like what is the ideal outcome for that PM or for yeah what is the ideal outcome here yeah I guess there there's two main things so one is like if you are non-technical you'll have a better understanding about what's actually happening when your developers are working on tooling so like just kind of through osmosis or by doing a little bit yourself you'll understand it better and then two is you'll actually be able to do you know prototype features yourself right so if you have an idea about like I said you know you want to build a chatbot into Google Docs or something like that you can prototype that out without investing in it first and then get in front of customers and I really advocate for like that workflow as a component of this idea is like you know learning the skill but then also changing the way that you're thinking about talking to customers or using those prototypes so yeah both of those two things as long as my nlii links don't get leaked into like Twitter or something you know yeah I mean there's a way to secure stuff like that as well but yeah exactly yeah and where can people find your course or you yeah so LinkedIn I have a very small following on LinkedIn I host sometimes there you can find me on suback as well technical foundation for product managers and then on M I obviously teach the two courses mentioned so the same name technical foundations for PMS that's the more like um you know learning how other these soft software systems work how to scale software and stuff like that and then AI prototyping for product managers which is what we talked about today awesome com this was like super practical I feel like I learn a lot like I think the main thing is like you know actually she ask me AI to basically explain what's going to do before just like randomly change a bunch of files I definitely do that moving forward and yeah thanks so much yeah thanks for having me