Host: If you're out there listening and you are doing engineering, you're doing your work locally, you really need to open your eyes. I think the future is pretty much 100% cloud agents. Ryan, you went all in. So much so, I think you spent $5,000 on Devon and then you went up to $20,000 one month. You know, I think one of my big messages for today is that all of us have to uplevel our ability to manage agents. Like that is our job. How do you effectively manage 10 20 100 500 employees? This is the whole reason that organizations were built as pyramids like humans can't scale and have a thousand directs.

Host: What is in your stack right now and how have you structured stuff to make you successful and build things effectively?

Ryan Carson: So what I'm doing is figure out how to manage you know throngs of agents and in Devon what what you're seeing is uh is folders and you'll notice P 0 is the big stuff. the these are the the main things I need to move forward as the business. New features, P1, P2. So at priority zero, I've got bugs. Let them work. Usually give them a goal. And it's just such a crazy different world we live in now.

Host: Welcome back to How I AI. I have a super special guest, Ryan Carson, one of our earliest How I AI episodes who is here to show us what has changed in the last 12 months in the age of coding agents. We're going to wax poetic about our favorite little AI intern, Devon. Talk about all the ways you're underutilizing your coding agents, and give maybe the most anti- AI episode of How I AI, where we talk about where AI can't solve your problems, how you need to get out in front and actually talk to people, and how pen and paper still have a place in his stack. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your co-pilot needs to see your entire codebase. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where work OS comes in. Work OS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. Ryan Carson, number one episode of How I AI from our early early days, is back again. I am so happy to have you here, my friend.

Ryan Carson: Oh, this is it's so fun to reconnect. Um, and the reason why the show is good is because of you. And, uh, just everybody listening, I'm not just kissing ass here. Uh, everybody that I meet, I say there's one show. If you're stressed about keeping up on AI, just listen to Claire's show.

Host: Oh, thank you. Well, I'm stressed keeping up with AI. So, I um will take all that stress on behalf of the audience and pass on what I know. What I also am so excited about this conversation is, you know, we did we did our first episode a year ago or even a little more than a year ago and like it's so different now.

Ryan Carson: Oh my god, we were such babies.

Host: I know. It's it's it's kind of funny like what we chatted about now and it'll be funny what we chat about now in a year, right?

Ryan Carson: Yes. Totally.

Host: And for those who have not gone in the archives, uh we did a really really popular episode about how to manage your agents with like it was like pre-sklls even. It was like three-step mark like you invented skills from first principles. It was like three-step markdown file. We were in an IDE which I haven't opened an IDE in like months. Um, we're in an IDE and and we were really you were very uh prescriptive and directive of your agents. You were very handy very handholdy. And now, you know, I don't know about you, I'll speak for myself. What the agents are doing is none of my business.

Ryan Carson: No, let them let them work. I usually give them a goal and yeah, it's just such a crazy different world we live in now. It's so exciting.

Host: Well, catch us up um because there's also been a lot of changes on your side in the last year. So, what are you up to and how has it, you know, impacted how you think about and work with AI these days?

Ryan Carson: Yeah. So, um I basically had this idea to make divorce better. So, I have uh three amazing sisters. We're like best friends. I have a sibling tattoo that's hard to show. It's right there. You know, we talk every week and then uh two of them started to go through pretty gnarly divorce. Um and my parents got divorced, too. So you know I was like divorce h like no one seems to be talking about divorce and AI what why like and so I just started working on that um and was of course empowered by Thor's hammer you know which is the large language models and and I started to build it um and this is when we chatted last you know I was in cursor you know like you said really handh holdy on the agent and since then thankfully it's just blown up um I basically figured out product market fit and everyone who's listening There's probably a ton of startup founders out there. You know, you're trying to find product market fit. You're pivoting fast. You're And I did what all founders do, right? You know, launched a a version of Untangle, um, which is the product, thought it was for consumers, went out, nobody, Turns out, nobody wants to use AI for divorce. They they want lawyers, people. Just I'm just going to say it. Um, and then I basically thought, okay, not PMF. I I'm old enough to know like and not hang on to things, just pivot. And uh I was like, "Okay, I'm going to get a meeting with a lawyer and just see what they think of this thing." And she I met with this amazing lawyer named Renee Bower and I was like, "Do you love this? Do you hate it? Is this like an enemy? Is it a friend?" And she said, "I love it. You know, I I there's a parallegal shortage. There's this discovery thing we do in divorce is a nightmare. I I I love it and I want to pay for it." And I was like, "Oh, you how much would you pay?" And she said, "A great number." and now we're we're B2B and we sell to family law firms. Um, and it's just exploding. So, I've been trying to hang on to this solo founder. I'm going to do it all myself thing and I'm completely overwhelmed.

Host: You and me both. And for folks that can't wait for the punchline, the punch line is Ryan Carson and Clairvo, famous solo founder. I can do it all myself. I need no friends other than AI. did our pre-show conversation talking about our regretful and imminent hiring of a bunch of hum of humans.

Ryan Carson: I'm gonna have to hire humans. And if any of those humans I'm talking to are listening, I love you and I'm excited about working with you now. But but the AI Yeah, it's you get spoiled hiring AIs. I mean, you know, you give them 45 pieces of feedback an hour. Um, you know, you're you anyway. So, yeah, going to hire some humans and grow the Untangle team. Very excited. But you haven't yet.

Host: And so I mean the the the good the good end part of the story is you were able to get to rapid iteration, lots of prototypes, product market fit with you and our mutual intern, Mr. Devon.

Ryan Carson: Mr. Devon.

Host: Mr. Devon. And so, you know, when when you were starting out again, you were like really coding, doing requirements, documents, all of that with AI, but you were very human in the loop. And as I've watched you over the past year, I've seen you slowly turn into AI bro who runs agents overnight. Um, so tell us about like what is in your stack right now? What is like very different from what we talked about a year ago? And how have you structured stuff to to make make you successful and build things effectively?

Ryan Carson: Totally. Um I like to say I'm in max Q right now for those of you that are are um you know SpaceX fans. It's like it the maximum pressure that I need to hire somebody. I'm doing all the work. And so yeah, what am I actually doing dayto-day? So I'll walk you through it. Um, I started off, you know, in uh a more specific agent like a cursor, um, like an AMP. Um, and and then I I I saw cloud happening. I'm like, "Okay, I'm really limited cuz I have to be at my machine and there's a lot of things I need to, you know, quick PRs like here's a bug, need to sort it out or what about this piece of data, need to, you know, and I was like, why why isn't cloud like I feel like I should be working on the cloud?" And I thought, what about Devon? Like Devon, you know, they've been doing cloud for like years now. It was kind of crap in the beginning, right? But maybe it's good now. And I tried it and I was like, "Wow, this this thing's really good. This is not good. It's really good." And you know, and I I thought, "Okay, I'm going to try it." And it was just blown away by how mature the cloud agent was. And and if you're out there listening and you know, you are doing engineering, you're doing your work locally, you really need to open your eyes. Like I I think the future is pretty much 100%, you know, cloud agents. there there's going to be some local dev. But so I started looking at that and was really impressed. So now I went all in. So much so I spent at one point I was like spending $5,000 on dev and then it went up to $20,000 one month and I'm like whoa wait a minute I have a big Twitter account. I'm going to go talk to the cognition guys and tell them to give me free credits and they did. So anyway, I you know get 20 grand of credits per month in Devon. Great. But the point is I live in Devon. I live in the cloud, right? So all of my engineering almost I and it's Devon's right here on my screen. I've got probably, you know, 10 probably 10 15 threads and I bucket them in folders cuz I remember one of your shows, you know, it was either you or your guest was saying it's sort of like four or five concurrent tasks you can actually keep track of. And I agree with that. So what I use is folders.

Host: Is there a way to show it?

Ryan Carson: Um, I can show it. I'll show you one thing, which is this piece of paper.

Host: Perfect.

Ryan Carson: And this is the reason we're doing where we say we're going to hire humans and we're just going to show you pieces of paper we scribble. Okay. The re but there's a there's a I'm doing this for a reason. Okay. So, the reason why I have folders for threads and the reason why I have a piece of paper is because it the skill is managing throngs of agents. like that is what I do now. And to to keep it straight in your head, you basically have to bucket these things. And so I have uh one bucket um uh that I'll I'll try to show this to you. Let let's see how let's see how dangerous this is going to become everybody. Okay. So everybody, this is Devon. This is my real setup that I'm literally working on today. And you know I think one of my big messages for today is that all of us have to uplevel our ability to manage agents like that is our job right and so how do you do that? How do you do that? How do you effectively manage 10, 20, 100, 500 employees basically? Um, this is the whole reason that organizations were built as pyramids, right? Like humans can't scale and have a thousand directs unless you're like Jensen Huang, then you can. But so what I'm doing is figuring out how to manage, you know, throngs of agents. And in Devon, what what you're seeing is um is folders. And you'll notice um I've got bugs, right? I've got P 0, P1, P2. So, it's a priority zero. What What are the things that I I really need to move forward no matter how distracted I get today. And so, I'm going to show you again my piece of paper. Tada. Okay. So, I I have two methods um for this. Don't laugh. It works. Um uh so the way I stay focused is number one, have a P 0 folder, but then you know I've got a Dell 52 here. I've got eight screens concurrently open, right? And so the way I stay focused is by also having this piece of paper which has weekly priorities on it.

Host: Oh, okay.

Ryan Carson: So, it's all about weekly what is important and and I'll and I'll cast my eye down here um at this beautiful UG Monk uh system I have, which I'm not being paid to say that. It's a fun little to-do system and that just keeps me grounded. Okay, so let's dig into this a little bit. Bugs is like, okay, there's some stuff going on. I want to get it pretty fast. It's not necessarily P 0. Um, you know, let's look at a couple of those. You know, that's the one we're looking at here. Investigate red error retries. Yep. Right. So, Devon's cranking on that. Um, there's a couple other bugs in there. P 0 is the big stuff. I'm not going to show you that, but that's just like these are the these are the the main things I need to move forward as the business. New features. Um, usually P1 is like ah stuff that's important. Anyway, it goes down. Um, investors, by the way, tip. Oh my god. Like, if you're not using an agent to help draft your investor updates and help you keep track of the business, like clearly do that. But here's the key. Build a skill to do it. And this is probably obvious to everybody. But another thing I love about Devon is this idea has playbooks. and playbooks are are are sort of there's this weird mix of skills playbooks you know sort of uh thing going on but I've built an investor update skill basically which does a lot so this is most of where I do work and then you'll find like then that means I do a lot of work here like I'll be on my phone and this is the other reality is like unfortunately that means I can work like 21 hours a day

Host: I do. And then you know and how do you deal with this? How do you deal with like the the the decision fatigue?

Ryan Carson: Yeah. So I want to reflect. I'm going to answer that question in just a second, but I want to reflect for folks what I'm seeing here because you and I are different AI managers and every time you come on I'm like no. I'm like, what an organized what an organized individual. I am so impressed by you. You're like, here's my three steps to man my managing my agents. And I'm like, you don't just like float in the tokens, see what comes out the other side. You're like, here are my like prioritized triaged folders for Devon. And I'm like, I just slack Devon. Like he belongs to me. I just like a sentry link. WTF question fix and that works. I mean there's nothing wrong.

Host: Yeah, it totally works. We're we're so different. But I do think you know something you said earlier I want people to hear which is like the job right now is to figure out how to manage agents. And the reason why I know both you and I are 27. So of course we're we're young. We're spring chicken infinite energy. The reason why I think folks of a certain level of experience are like ready to cook right now with AI is all those management skills that you have developed over your career, oh my god, can be applied right here, right now. How do you structure? How do you team? How do you prioritize? How do you delegate? When you have a team of 500, how do you still stay anchored on like the three things that are most important for you to do? Yes. Where do you micromanage? Where do you let go? Like all that stuff still pays off.

Ryan Carson: Yeah. And it pays off. Yep. I I think in multiples like um so another practical tip I want to talk about is I have um it's a playbook, but it could be a skill if you're not using Devon. It's called Watchdog. and and you know, we're starting to pick up a lot of family law firms now and they have a lot of cases, right? And and I'm literally doing customer success and engineering and sales, right? And so it's like, whoa, how do you keep track of actually what's going on in these cases? You know, where where are clients hitting UX bugs? Like where what oh my god, how do you keep track of it? So watchdog, what it does, and I this is multiple iterations, everybody. So what you want is like when that moment where you feel like I need to know what's going in the business right now. I feel stressed. I don't know what's happening. Uh this is when I run watchdog and and what it does is it basically it it has a skill for that that's repeated for each firm. So think of these as customers, right? Uh it and it goes into each account and says what's going on with this account like what was the activity since we last did watchdog? Where are the errors? Where are the sentry uh uh um errors? You know, where does all this happen? But then but then you don't want just data. You want it to be transposed and filtered and sorted for you. So then it comes up with the top three things that are going wrong. And then either like, well, wait, have they been fixed? because we're shipping a lot of PRs. Like I'm shipping probably 40 PRs a day now. So, did it get fixed or is it currently being fixed or is there an open PR that never got merged? Right. And it just gives me all that and then I talk to that thread about okay, let's dig in a little bit. And that's how I manage the chaos.

Host: Yeah. I you know, you asked me how do I manage the the the decision fatigue? And I feel like I start a business for every child I have. So like three kids, three businesses. I have a lot of decision fatigue. There's there's a couple things that that I do. I approach it very differently, which is I think about bucketing my time more than I think about bucketing the tasks, which is like there's time in the day that I do like very very specific tasks where I'm co-piloting with AI. There's other time where I'm just like I dedicate to spinning off everything or checking in. So I have to buck as a solo founder, I have to bucket my own time on things. The other thing that I use is I use decision fatigue as a priority prioritization heristic which is functionally if there is a feature that I'm working on that I let die on the vine. That is my that's your symbol. That's my symbol for maybe this one is not the one I really care or believe in. And so um I I sometimes think that people, you know, don't don't tell anybody. I know I'm a token maxer and you should let your agents run 24 hours a day and ship as much code as humanly possible and software everywhere. And I really don't ship more than I think the market wants like I really try to res like constrain my output not quality not on bugs but like because I don't I don't think I get multiples of quality off of multiples of output.

Ryan Carson: I totally agree. And so I would rather reserve that creative energy for something else or at least keep it inside till there is something there. And so I do um I run less overnight. I run like bugs and triage and all that kind of stuff. I also work with an engineer so we kind of pingpong overnight but I don't I don't do the sort of like seek out ideas, solve them and always ship them because I just don't one it it puts too much on me and two I don't think it actually adds value.

Host: I agree. I I actually think we're nowhere near any frontier model having the intelligence to know what to ship. It's it's like a million miles. I mean So yeah, I think you know I think we all wanted these sort of like automatic improvement loops to and they just don't work with product. They're kind of a joke.

Ryan Carson: And and I and I tell people it's also because all of this intelligence has not magically created markets where there were none before other than AI markets, right? It's like it's not like all of a sudden there are these like buyers that have shown up for solutions that somebody Yeah. for stuff. And so I do think there's this like mismatch between the quantity of output of code and like commercializable product.

Host: Amen. So I want to double click on that. I think what what what is happening is people are not getting out of their chair enough and actually talking to real people. So, so you know the way I figured out PMF for Untangle was, you know, I went outbound with an email, I did a a Google meet with a potential customer and I talked to them. Boom. That was step one. But then step two is like as soon as we landed them as a customer, I was like, "Can I come to your office?" And I just want to sit and I want to talk and I want to and this is all like obvious product stuff, but I think because we can ship so much and build so much digital product, we're we're not getting out of our chairs enough. Go talk to humans for real. Talk to humans. Yep. And build something neat.

Host: This episode is brought to you by Jira by Atlassian. The teamwork graph in Jira delivers 44% more accurate agent results with 48% less token usage. That's a huge difference when working with AI coding agents like Claude, Cursor, Codeex, or Copilot. The hardest part of shipping with AI isn't the code, it's the context. What's the right ticket? What did the spec say? What got decided in Slack? The teamwork graph pulls all of that from across your entire stack from Jira and Confluence to GitHub and feeds it directly to your agents before they write a single line. You assign the work, the agent gets everything it needs and a PR surfaces when it's ready. No digging, no context switching, no broken flow. Same team, smarter agents. Try them free at jira.dev. That's J I R A.dev. The other thing I want to touch on because I think you breezed past it, but it has been a gamecher for me in terms of using background agents and in particular Devon, which is I think people have still bucketed these cloud coding agents as coding agents, which is like their only job is to write code for a product or software product. And in fact, Devon runs Deal Desk for me. So Devon's doing quoting, custom quoting for me.

Ryan Carson: Yeah. Like setting out operations, um, documentation, customer triage, like I I always think, you know, what would you do with somebody who both knew your code base and could write code to solve anything in your business? That's how I use these these background agents. And I do think that um people really don't ask enough of their back background agents and especially of ones that are very good at coding. I think this is why it's so interesting. Cursor just yesterday came out or cursor or Grock whoever who whoever they are at these came out with Grockbot and I was like you know what the cursor chat experience as a as a as a background agent was a great one. It was like one of our first first episodes. And so I'm not surprised to see these like coding platforms start to generalize into business agents in general. And I also feel like more than engineers need to get hands-on with with background agents and cloud cloud agents because there's so much that they can do for your business pretty autonomously.

Host: 100%. Um but let's talk about though why probably both of us are still using local agents uh for some things. So it's so right now as well I have codeex running um and I have and I have it using goal and I find that in particular like the low latency plus the browser on my machine pairing like plus like basically infinite tokens you know from from from OpenAI. Um yeah cool. I'll take the subsidy. Um, that, you know, plus goal really, really is good for when you have this kind of I've got a feature, it's a lot of front-end UI. Yep. I just need you to grind for a lot and I need to be here and kind of hold your hand. Y, I find Codex unmatched for that.

Ryan Carson: Yeah. So, if I were to because what we said we would do is compare and contrast our solo founder AI setup. So I would say I am personally spending my time in codecs when I'm pair programming or or managing a product. It's it falls into a couple categories. It's going to be like large feature initiatives that span front end and backend that both like again need like a lot of code written and you have to grind on it and needs that like intervention every now and then to narrow it to the experience that you want. um a lot of like long running refactors and hectets stuff like again I think the latency is unmatched it's goal is really really effective sub agents are really really effective um and then I use codeex a lot for ver I think it's very good at verification and so a combination of goal plus a CLI tool inside your codebase that can verify core flows or I use goal and browser use to do front-end verification a lot. So I say write user stories, use Chrome, pull up the preview branch in Chrome, go through it as a user, list which user stories pass, identify bugs, fix them until you're good. Those are kind of what I'm using codecs for. When I'm using background agents, it's a lot of like autofixes on bugs. um oneoff like when I'm on calls with with customers and they say, "Oh, do you have this MCP?" I'm like, "I do now." Um so oneoff things and then sort of um operations as you said, like I use a lot of agents for for operations and then you know I do have a couple like purpose-built agents in the stack. So, I use Bugbot a lot for PR review and then I just built this thing delightfully called Mergemmy that that does risk assessment on my PRs and auto approves lowrisk ones. Um, because I am also shipping a lot of PRs and so that's

Host: and is that tell me about Mer tell me about merge mommy like that's and then I'll tell you about my land PR skill. I want to compare and contrast.

Ryan Carson: Yeah, so I did an episode on this a week or two ago. It's an EVE agent, so it's deployed on Burcell. And whenever a PR is opened and then passes all its CI checks, including Bugbot, Merge Mommy gets triggered. And then what she looks at is she scores the PR on like five aspects of risk, like cool, how big a blast radius, security, whatever it is. And then if it um gets scored as a low, Merge Mommy stamps it with an approval and we can merge without a human approval. But if it's medium or high, then it pings us in Slack and says it pings um either my colleague or I or somebody else in Slack and says this one's ready for you to review because for our sock 2 compliance and all our controls, we require kind of like alternative review. Um and it just allows us to like get through our PRQ very effectively. Yeah. Yeah, first of all, annoyed I missed that episode. That sounds amazing. I'm going to go watch it. Um, but number two, interesting.

Host: So I have something called land PR where basically it's it's a playbook in Devon but you can think of it as a skill and it's bas usually it's when the agent comes back and says okay the PR is done you know and and then uh I trigger it and then what it does is it basically makes sure that number one it runs a fresh Devon review on the PR which and Devon review is like an actual product inside of Devon which is another reason why I think people should just pick I'll I'll sort rant about that later, but the code factory like it should have a good a good built-in review that is a real review product, right? So, it triggers a review and then it basically allows up to two loops on that, right? you know, okay, all right, find all the all the bugs, check that all the comments are are are resolved, and then and then there'll be some more that come up, do it again, does it twice, and then then the thing is is it records a a video walkthrough. Um, and and this I find Devon is just really good at like, so what it does is it records in the browser and it actually kind of narrates over it. It's got captions about it's doing and it's got this cool little little test, you know, list of tests it's doing and whether they're red or green and you get all this out of the box. Like I tried to build my own code factory and get all this stuff and I was like I don't have time to do this and so the land PR basically it has to show me that video and then I then I say video approved land it and then it will merge. Um so that really works for me. It's kind of that I think this is where CI/CD and DevOps like now you have to be even better at it like and really care about it and and we use merge cues and GitHub as well. I'm loving merge cues. Um so couple of the nitty-gritty this is what I'm actually doing stuff.

Ryan Carson: Have you Okay, you all know this is how you know. Not not sponsored by Cognition, but you all are welcome. Um we love you. Yeah, come on. Um I can't get Devon video verification to work. I can occasionally get it to screenshot really and like on front end stuff it taps my um my credits for the session and then just falls over. I don't know if it's probably a problem. It's probably a mi problem. All AI things are probably a mi problem. No, but I have not been able but I actually I do want to show this for folks that um want to know exactly what it looks like because I found an example of it. So I'm claiming that it doesn't work but then I'm going to make it work. Hold on. Devon will actually go ahead and test it and record a little video of it using and you can see these little captions down here. Uh it's exposing it's its reasoning. It's super cool. It's very useful. I can just only get it to work so a couple interesting comments I have in that. Number one, interesting that you're in Slack. Um Oh, I I'm never in Devon UI. Never. Okay. So, interestingly, I'm never in Slack.

Ryan Carson: Um, I am trying to cut Slack completely out of Untangle and and and and the way the company is going to exist. Um, and I was laughing because you have so many sidebar, you know, um, notifications and exclamation points and and we were saying, you know, you're seeing the Devon preview in Slack and and I have a a very kind of perfect experience with the video playback testing of Devon and that's cuz they use the web app. And so here's what I'm thinking, and again, this is probably going to change, but as we hire people, I'm actually going to require like multi-user uh interaction to happen through Devon. So, we talk in threads about what is going on. That's thing one cuz cuz then you're not trying to always figure out where's the context for this thing, you know? Is it in your agent? Is it in Slack? Is it in Google Docs? Like where is it? So, I'm going to try to do that. Now, obviously that doesn't work for DMs and channels and all that stuff, but I also think and Jack Dorsey, I think, was saying this, you know, they launched Buzz. It's kind of interesting. I think he banned DMs or somebody banned DMs in their company. Um, and I think, you know, as we scale, I'm going to do the same thing. Like, I don't want any one-on-one chats. Like, if we're having private conversations, I'll have to call you. Um, so that's why I I just think Slack is not built for the AI age.

Host: Well, let me let me tell you why I love Slack. Okay. I like to convince me. I like to person first. I like to personify my agents. I like to as a solo founder, I need my colleagues to be fun. Fair. Fair. I'm just boring and meme. Um, it's it's marginally more fun in Slack to use Dev than in the web app. Although I they're interchangeable actually. You're just seeing a reflection of the web app. The the reason why I think I had been so um committed to Devon in Slack is actually not because I think it's a better experience. It's that very early on deploying background agents inside companies. This is where we're going to agree to agree inside companies. So when I was at Launch Darkly and we were first deploying background agents in particular Devon, it was such an effective change agent move to put these background agents in public Slack threads. Interesting. And so like it was one of the places actually it was the only place I had experienced up to that point where you could do real time coding work in public. Cool. And I think that changes people's perception of oh what is AI capable of doing? How do I work with AI better? Um, and then I do think, you know, in particular, Devon is pretty good at multiplayer um chat. It's one of the few ones that like you don't trip over your colleagues when you're both both chatting in a thread in Slack. But I think it's yeah uh in both in Slack and in in in the web app. And I think um it's just I'm a creature of habit having told everybody to shove their Devon threads in public channels. Yeah. um that that's why I'm using it. Okay. You know, I'm

Ryan Carson: I do think that chat's not going away because I think that's how humans like to work like communicate. So, it's hard to feel like chat's going away going away. But I do think more and more people if they don't want to get rid of Slack, want to get rid of Slack culture, which is like DM culture, private channel culture, like I don't want any of that crap. Needless needless conversation culture that doesn't result. It doesn't do anything. Yeah. And so almost like every thread in Slack should result in work. Yep. But it doesn't feels better. It doesn't. It devolves into just you know and I love humans, trust me. But I I don't listen, you know, I've I did a stint at Intel where I was an employee and I learned a lot about being what it's like to be an employee, you know, and I just realized you spend a lot of time talking about stuff that doesn't matter. you're not empowered to do anything and it's like, you know, what's the point of that? So, and and you're the agent is always going to need the context of whatever you're talking about. So, so have the have the conversation there. So, before we leave, I know you have a hard stop. Um, I do want to talk about the third plane uh that I have, which which is a little bit of cloud code. So, I I Yeah. So, I'm number one, it's like it feels like infinite tokens. Um, but I just can't get around how good claw design is. Now, I don't mean in coming up with new design. I think it's bad. But I think for carrying forward, you know, a design system, it it it does something magical that Codex is hilariously bad at. Devon is terrible at at design and so I always have to go back to claw design. So, am I missing something or do you do something magical design that's working for you?

Host: You know, this is a this is a great question. I was telling you before this, I'm launching a new business. We've got a new brand, new design, and so I went through this process very recently. So, I can tell you what I did. I think Claw Designs create a design system is like unmatched right now. Okay. It's it does it does a great job of decomposing either an example site or a Figma or something into relative non-slop. design tokens you can reuse across across um across a property. Now that being said, my most recent processes I went to cloud design. I created the the kind of like design and the the design file in in Claw Design. I downloaded that, gave it to Codeex and said, "Take this plus what's in the Figma and actually build me a technical design system." Oh. And it built all the shared components. It made this nice like interlinking in our mono repo. Oh wow. Um and then I I also tested with codeex using the Figma plugin to then go pull all those designs tokens back into Figma into components that I could use. Um so once you have the design MD imported it to imported it to codeex. Yeah, that's exactly exactly what I did.

Ryan Carson: I mean, my problem with Claude infinite tokens, very intelligent, my blood boils reading Claude output. It like actually raises my blood pressure. It makes me so. So, I the the one podcast I listened about the like the the the opinion on Opus 5 was yours cuz I I love your take and I couldn't agree more. I'm so sick of Opus 5. like it it's just so frustrating. It it's terrifying in one way cuz it's like oh my god it's way worse than we thought you know about everything and so you're like okay you know which is actually what's wrong here is and I so it's like super smart but s I really am sick of Opus 5. Yeah.

Host: Yeah. But I do think I the the applications in some like very specific deep spikes cyber security design like kind of unbeatable on the on the execution side still include but um I am I just the the harness experience of codeex is just a lot more effective and enjoyable for me. It's so good. So, last question I have before we go is like we can both answer, you go first. Like, what's your current actual um EA? Like, who's your actual sidekick that does all of your agent work as an executive assistant?

Ryan Carson: Paulie the OpenClaw.

Host: Interesting. Okay. You're on OpenClaw.

Ryan Carson: Still live in OpenClaw. Okay. Just committed there. Yeah. I love OpenClaw. I love Pete. I love the team. I love it. I just moved off. Um I was like, screw it. I'm just going to run cloud code um on my Mac Mini. Um and I actually want to switch to codecs cuz I just love love love the UI of codecs. It there's so it's the it's wonderful the whole thing. So yep. Yeah. No, I use I still poly the open claw is still still running but I do now have my emails constantly open in the browser in Codeex and Codex functionally runs my email. It it it it ran through 2,000 unread emails in my Gmail the other day and just changed my life.

Host: This is this has been a game changer. Um so like you I've hired a lot of people in my life like hundreds and hundreds of people and let go lots of people and all this kind of stuff. So um I the way I'm running my hiring process right now really love it and we'll see if it works out. But but I think I think this is interesting. Um, so what I decided to do

Ryan Carson: is I I basically on Twitter I was like, "Okay, we're hiring our first engineer. You got to be like super duper duper AI forward, you know, of course, and I don't really care where you live. And all I want you to do is record a video full screen, everything, your your whole desktop of you building a new feature for an app that already exists. And I just want to see the whole thing. Um, and I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to have a meeting with you. I don't want to get to know if I like you. I just want to see how good of an agent manager you are. And uh the videos I'm getting are fascinating and very revealing about whether I would want to work with this person. And I'm liking it. So, I've got, you know, a number of people that are probably going to move to phase two where then what I'm do is say, okay, give them access to Devon and actually build a real thing and then but record a video of that and then basically at the end I'll do some sort of quick, well, we should meet, you know, and chat and then I'm going to hire them and then I'm just going to watch their agent output and that's how I'm going to manage them. I mean, well, one other thing is if they work with Devon, you get the replay video anyway of how the Devon computer works. So, save you saved you a step.

Host: Thank you. The one meta observation I have on this is you're almost hiring a human like you would hire an agent, which is like, I love you. Like, we'll get along, I'm sure, but like really, I just want to see how you do this. You're you're doing a verification loop is what you're saying and think about how much better this is in this insane way we used to hire. Yeah.

Ryan Carson: Yeah.

Host: You like I like this person like you and then you're like we're going to kind of ask you to do some weird technical project and then so very excited to see this shake out. Okay. Well, um just to recap for everyone, the the two most AI pill on your timeline spent most of our time talking about how too much AI code doesn't really get you great product. [snorts] Amen.

Ryan Carson: You should just go outside with your human body and talk to customers. Keep your priority on a piece of paper

Host: on your list. It works. Um, it works. But, you know, on on the technical stuff, set up your background agents. Prioritize their work in a way that you can manage. Everybody's becoming agent managers. Your coding agent can do more for you than just code. And the new interview is just let them cook and and do a screen share. Um, and also to conclude, the solo founder AI agent managers are both hiring. So Ryan, where can we we I know we can find you online, but where can we find you and how can we be helpful? Who are you hiring for?

Ryan Carson: Thank you. So I'm super active on X, so just Ryan Carson. Um, hit me up anytime. And then uh uh if you want to help people have better divorces because people are going to get divorced, okay? Um go to untangle. us, check us out, and then just shoot me a DM with a video of you working. Um and I think we're going to hire someone pretty fast. So So move fast and uh and and say hello.

Host: And I'll say if you impress Ryan with your video, you're probably going to be an upcoming guest of How I AI, where you will show us how you use your background agents. Awesome. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for joining. This has been a blast. Thank you. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiipod.com. See you next time.