Show Notes

Visit TK's AI radar screen page at CYBERSELF.NET

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Transcript

Project 20 Welcome back to Foresight Radio, where we dive deep into the technologies that are shaping our world and explore how they're redefining the way we work, live and lead. I'm Tom Delap, and today this episode is part confession and part revelation. I'm going to tell you how I, someone who hadn't written a line of code since the Reagan administration, built a working website and a pretty sophisticated one at that. And I did it all by chatting with an AI, like I was ordering a cup of coffee. Okay. A bit more complicated than that, but not by much. There was no syntax involved. Just plain English. And stick with me till the very end here, because I'm actually going to give you a link where you can go and use this site, which I use on a day to day basis. Now to keep me up to date on developments in AI. So what made it possible then? You kind of AI that's not just smart, it's agenda. As I've talked about in prior podcasts, this notion of agent based technology is going to revolutionize AI. Agents have autonomy. They can access resources, they can make decisions on their own, and they can interact with you to get clarification in order to make those decisions. It's a new kind of AI that's not just smart, but it's actually able to collaborate with you in real time. Doesn't just answer questions the way a chatbot does, it actually gets things done. There's a new term to describe all of this. It's called vibe coding, and it was a term coined by Andrej Karpathy, who was previously the director of AI at Tesla and one of the founding team members at OpenAI. According to Andre, Vibe coding is where you fully give into the vibes, you embrace the exponentials and forget that code even exists. And what makes all this possible is applications like windsurf or cursor composer with sonnet that are getting pretty amazing at code. In fact, this may be one of the greatest near-term productivity enhancers of large language models and agenda I. So this is the story of me and a technology called windsurf, something that I've mentioned in prior podcasts. Windsurf is a coding agent, but it does much more than just autocomplete a line of code. It can actually evaluate code, it can help you debug and you can give it objectives. And based on those objectives, it can build applications for you. Something that was inconceivable just a few years ago. So let me paint a picture for you. I wanted to create a site that would pull the top news stories about AI, and I wanted that site to update itself dynamically so that without having to refresh the page, I could just have it on one of my monitors sitting there all day so I could see what's going on with AI. And every time a new news story popped up, it would populate on that site. So I had an entire page filled with various articles from different publications that cover AI, and each one would update in real time as that news changed. I also wanted the site to be contemporary, to look good, to go into dark mode or light mode, and I wanted all of this to be done on a hosted platform in the cloud. So how does someone who hasn't coded for the past 35 years go about that? Well, I didn't need to know modern programming languages like Python or even basic HTML, because windsurf entered into a conversational dialogue with me where I described what I wanted, and then it began to create it. So I began with something along the lines of this prompt hey, I want a clean site that aggregates the latest AI stories using RSS feeds. I want it to update in real time, and I want to keep it simple, sleek and minimalist. Make it good looking on mobile as well, and allow me to switch between dark mode and light mode and create a pop up that talks about how the site was created, and also a subscription link that will allow people to add themselves to my constant contact list so that I can inform them of updates on the site. Oh, and by the way, could you also include a link to my digital persona so that people can ask questions of my knowledge base if they'd like? And here's what windsurf did. It built the site. It created the Python code. It provisioned the site on GitHub. It deployed it to render. Now there was a little bit of back and forth. I had to get involved here to get permissions on both GitHub and render. It created a pop up window that talked about how the site was built and how it was created. It linked to my podcast on Foresight Radio, which I didn't even tell it to do, but it did that as a result of my asking it to link to other properties that I've got, and then it created a button that linked to my digital shelf so that someone could ask a question of my knowledge base. It did all of this over the course of a few days, while I was sipping a cup of coffee, going back and forth in a dialogue with it, asking it to debug certain things that didn't look quite right, and literally collaborating with me the way an IT developer would. And this is the promise of a genetic AI, right? It's not just a chat bot that you ask questions of. It's not just an auto complete for code that you're creating if you're a coder. It understands intent, and it breaks that intent down into tasks and specific resources, and it figures out the best way to execute those tasks and which resources it needs to be able to execute those tasks. It does all the work. It's like hiring a team, not just an individual, but a team of invisible interns who never sleep, never argue, and don't need health insurance. Now, I've got to say, this cuts both ways because as I was using windsurf, I realized that if I can build this sophisticated of a website without knowing any code, imagine what someone with a bit of malicious intention could do with zero technical skills. And that's why this sort of tech, I'm convinced, is going to demand not just wonder, but some degree of wisdom here, or some set of values that will enable us to put guardrails on this technology. A genetic AI isn't just a new tool. This is where we get it wrong. AI is much more than a tool. It has agency. It is an entity. It's a shift in how we build, launch and scale ideas and businesses. It lowers the barrier to creation, which means that the biggest advantage now is not going to go to those who have the best tech skills, but to those with the best ideas, and then the initiative to be able to use entities like a genetic AI to help build out those ideas. So what's next? Look, this isn't just about building websites. This is sort of a metaphor for a much larger phenomenon. It's about building anything apps, services, even businesses, without needing a team of coders or investors. In 12 months or 24 months of runway. This is a road that we started to go down some time ago, and when I wrote Cloud Surfing nearly 20 years ago, I talked about how the ability to provision the power of computing to individuals and small businesses would radically alter economies from scale to scale. In other words, you don't need to invest in scale in order to launch a business, but instead you can use the scope, this broad scale of providers of various services that charge pennies to get you started on off the ground, and then you can scale with your business as your business grows. And that's what we're seeing now with agenda AI. The future is being shaped by these sorts of tools like windsurf that are not just AI, but literally artificial initiative. And if you want to see that magic in action for yourself, by the way, just head over to Cyber Self Dot net. That's the site that I built or windsurf built. And you'll see how amazing this technology really is. It's live, it's simple, and it updates itself with the latest AI news regularly throughout the day. You can even subscribe to get updates delivered straight to you. And yes, it actually works. And I use it daily personally as my digest of what's new in the field of AI. That's it for today's episode. Go check out Sign Myself dot net. Subscribe if you're curious and poke around. Say hi to my digital self. It's kind of like me. Just more available and slightly less caffeinated. Thanks for listening. If you're enjoying Foresight Radio, be sure to subscribe and share it with friends and colleagues. The best way to navigate the future is to keep asking questions. Embrace change and seek out new perspectives. Until next time, I'm Tom. As always, stay curious.