More Cowork Love, “Data Gene” Gets a Rebrand, Tiny Bottle, and the End of Wordpress

Announcer: Welcome to Raw Data with Rob Collie. Real talk about AI and data for business impact. And now CEO and founder of P3 Adaptive, your host, Rob Collie.

Rob Collie: Welcome back to day 21 of the Rob is sick podcast.

Justin Mannhard...: No.

Rob Collie: Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. Three weeks of not exercising. It's been good for productivity. So what's [00:00:30] been happening this week?

On my end, you've seen it on LinkedIn. We became a dual Mac family and we've gone from zero max lifetime to one to two in an eye blink. And I was with Jocelyn last night as she launched into her first Cowork session ever. And it's like watching a superhero origin story play out. At first, this feels like work. She's like me. She does not dig this. Wow. New computer, [00:01:00] new operating system. How do I minimize a window? It's just all of this stuff sucks.

Justin Mannhard...: Oh yeah.

Rob Collie: And then installing things and all the different logins. She has to log in like 11 different times, a huge investment just to get back to zero. You got to create a folder in OneDrive and you got to pin the files so that it's always local. And all this prep work is long delay until payoff. The developer mindset is fine with that. The data gene mindset isn't. [00:01:30] Data gene mindset thrives on instant feedback. And by the way, I'm rebranding the data gene.

Justin Mannhard...: You're going to rebrand it.

Rob Collie: We're rebranding it in the book. It's official.

Justin Mannhard...: It's a big deal. Are you giving it a proper sendoff? Is there a funeral pyre or something? What are we doing?

Rob Collie: At the moment, there isn't even a mention of data gene.

Justin Mannhard...: Can that be in the acknowledgements at the front?

Rob Collie: We like to thank the Academy and the data gene. I don't know. I might have a note in there that actually says I used to call it the data gene. I forget. But I need a word that's [00:02:00] more compact and also more inclusive of the future.

Justin Mannhard...: No. That makes sense. Yeah.

Rob Collie: So I'm calling them Crafters.

Justin Mannhard...: Okay.

Rob Collie: And I think it fits. I'm already starting to think of our team here is 90% of us are crafters. I'm a crafter. I'm taking Jocelyn through this path as a fellow crafter. This is just a slog.

Justin Mannhard...: Right.

Rob Collie: Where's the juice? Where's the payoff?

Justin Mannhard...: Want to be excited. This is not fun or exciting.

Rob Collie: But somewhere along the way where we've connected the Chrome [00:02:30] extension and this thing, so she's got this project. She's working on trying to find some video editors on Fiverr. But about the time that this thing starts automating Chrome and just devouring the Fiverr website is just she's like, "Wait, wait a second." Well, it's really cool. She's done this process manually for a little while over the past couple of days. The fact that the first thing it does is turn up the same four people that she had also turned up [00:03:00] was like, ooh, zero net progress, but really validating. Actually, no, it found something that sucked. And she came back and said, "No, those suck." And it goes, "All right, I'll look a little deeper." And then it came back with those four. She's like, "Okay, now we're cooking." It taught her about creating Claude MD and giving it instructions that it remembers and all that stuff. And it still hasn't reached the point where it's like she comes downstairs in the morning and is like, "I got to get into the Mac." That's coming, right? We need one [00:03:30] more session.

Justin Mannhard...: Jocelyn, I feel you because I just finished doing the same slog on the Mac Mini and I've not yet got to where I want to be doing stuff, but I needed my password vault over there. I need my browsers. So if I'm on this device or that device, I still have all the things I need for work to communicate with people and all that. So I'm there. I have core functional parity between my PC and my Mac. [00:04:00] I've done zero cool things with the Mac yet.

Rob Collie: I've slowly started migrating ... Well, not migrating, but hooking up Claude Code. So all the projects that I have on my PCs, I've got Claude Code now on the Mac. I'm not even going into VS code. I'm just using the code tab and I have it connected. I've pushed a couple of repos from the PC and pulled them back down, cloned them, and started to advance the state of the art over there. And I have to one at a time push them up. The code that worked on Windows doesn't quite [00:04:30] work on Mac because the paths are different. So there's some adjustment. I really missed that delete key in the home in the end, man.

Justin Mannhard...: Well, I did figure out where to go to swap control and command. I did that much, but there is no known way as far as I've researched to replace alt tab on a Mac.

Rob Collie: It's just option tab. Oh no, but you can't alt tab between Windows of the same app. There's a third party add on, I think it's called alt [00:05:00] tab or something like that. And I tried it, but it didn't seem to deliver what I wanted.

Justin Mannhard...: Install this third party thing. I didn't go through it. I was like, ah. The muscle memory in your 10 fingers, man, is insane.

Rob Collie: Yeah. It's tough. And then I start to adjust to it and then I have to flip back to the PC for something. It's like, oh no. It's like the real test is where the high watermark is. When I would visit startups back in the day when I was like going around pitching for funding [00:05:30] for this company when I thought we were going to be a hosting company instead of a consulting company, I got to go to a lot of startups and it was wall to wall Macs everywhere I went, except there was always one person with the PC and that was the Excel person. And that, as far as I know, hasn't changed. I checked in with Bill Gallen today and I said, "Hey, at the world modeling championships, has anyone shown up with a Mac yet?" And he said, "No, but we had someone show up with Excel 2013 this year."

Justin Mannhard...: Wow.

Rob Collie: PC Excel 2013 has shown up once, Mac [00:06:00] zero. And I have my feelers out to find out if any of the big Wall Street shops have become Mac friendly. I doubt it. These are bastions.

Justin Mannhard...: If you're that level of a power user in Excel, you're using the most advanced combination of feature sets to do what you're doing.

Rob Collie: Yeah. And of course, the modelers, when they bring their laptops, they also bring separate keyboards, like full size keyboards. No one's using their laptop keyboards. So control end, control home, all these things, these people speak [00:06:30] a language through their hands that is almost as sophisticated as human verbal language. It's nuts. I'm still really, really, really grumpy about the lack of delete home and end. I'm learning the home and end thing keyboard shortcut, but control backspace to get a delete, I just don't think I'm ever going to get to the point where that's okay with me.

Justin Mannhard...: I'm going to choose to believe in you for a couple of weeks and then I'll let it go.

Rob Collie: [00:07:00] You believe in me in that I exist. Do you believe in Rob Collie? Well, I'm pretty sure he's real.

Justin Mannhard...: Heard he's in Fiji.

Rob Collie: I don't know what he was before that. That's been my week. I don't have a lot of really cool, new, interesting things to report. I really wish I'd had one more day with Jocelyn and Cowork. Next week, if I don't have something really cool to say about Jocelyn's explosion then I haven't done my job.

Justin Mannhard...: What have I been up to? Let's [00:07:30] see.

Rob Collie: You've decloked the name.

Justin Mannhard...: Last time it was a mention on the podcast, I still said it was TVA. We just backed into that cute little coincidence more than anything. But yeah. So we're out officially as Tiny Bottle AI. Our website, first iteration is up and running at tinybottleai.com.

Rob Collie: First iteration. I like that.

Justin Mannhard...: I've tried to describe it in conversations with other people. When you start something from literal zero with everything that's going on [00:08:00] in AI right now, and you can make all the choices based on what you now know about where technology is going, it's really exciting. I've had the domain tinybottleai.com for a few years, and I told the backstory on something we put out, but Tiny Bottle was the name of a song my college band wrote. And I was like, "Oh, if I ever had a side quest of some kind, what would I call it?" And I just, "Oh, I'll call it that." It was coincidental. We're like, "Oh, we could go TVA for a little while." [00:08:30] Never thought of that before. But I bought it through a Wix account. P3s existed for almost 15 years in total and there's just all this stuff which you decided on all those things based on where you were at a point in time. We were looking at the developer plugins for Wix and no, Claude Code absolutely hates this. We're moving this domain somewhere else so we can be as AI friendly as possible. [00:09:00] We're a two person show. We need AI to be able to help us as much as possible with everything.

Rob Collie: Which forces you to do things the right way. This is one of those cases where lacking resources pushes you in the right direction. Sometimes lacking resources pushes you in the wrong direction. It doesn't care. It's neutral. But this is one of those cases where it's pushing you in the right direction. So did you land on any framework at all like WordPress or anything like that, or is [00:09:30] it just straight code?

Justin Mannhard...: Straight code top to bottom. We're using Vercel for hosting and deployment. I think Vercel is a really good example of where people have been critical about AI-based development. What about security and infrastructure? And I said, "Well, people are going to show up and solve these types of problems." And we get a ton of value that we moved our domain there. That's where we get analytics, that we get security there. We get all kinds of things that we didn't [00:10:00] have to code up, but the website itself, the web application is straight code, top to bottom.

Rob Collie: Nice. That's really cool. Nathan's a huge fan of Vercel, by the way, here at our company. But I didn't know their origins. I only know them through the thing that Nathan's been really excited about lately, which is their ability to integrate things into Teams and Slack. I suppose that's my pinhole view on that company, but it sounds like what you're describing is really where they came from.

Justin Mannhard...: They're absolutely [00:10:30] providing value in that space of platform. I was actually running through my brain if I were going to ... Okay, we're going to have a straight code web application that needs to run somewhere. If I were to deploy the equivalent Azure infrastructure to do everything I'm getting with Vercel, I couldn't do it.

Rob Collie: Makes total sense. We need frameworks like that so that people like us can do our thing while still having that robustness. [00:11:00] That again, if we go back to this crafter mindset, it takes a different kind of brain and a different type of patience to slog through something for what feels like almost no benefit. Let's say pre-AI. I can go sync a thousand hours into this product and at the end it's not noticeably different at all. It's just not going to have an occasional problem that someone needs to do that. Someone needs to do that [00:11:30] work. Not every personality is suited for it. It has to be its own reward, like the journey, whereas I think the rest of us, like the crafter mentality I've been talking about, we're a little bit addicted to that in a good way. It's a positive addiction. We're addicted to that payoff. We can't wait forever for it. Yeah. It's like, thank you other people who are willing and able to go and build those sorts of things so that I don't have to.

Justin Mannhard...: The crafter [00:12:00] concept, now I've been working on something most of today where there's a ton of code that's coming out as a result of ... But I've spent most of my time thinking and writing, providing my authentic, natural input into this thing, not figuring out how to get this to come together and I can give the critical feedback. It's very gratifying to be able to work that way. We talked a little bit about this last week when you were mentioning being able to work [00:12:30] with PowerPoint, talking about how when AI can get the components of something. I just think the platforms ... People are going to demand the ability to work this way. And you can say, "Oh, it'll take time, markets adapt but this will be the standard." People will expect to be able to have this type of crafting experience across all kinds of things.

Rob Collie: That conversation about PowerPoint last week, when I relistened to it, you pointed out how significant it was. And I agree, [00:13:00] got to redigest it. When the AI system is working with a file format that's like, when it comes back to it each time, it sees the layers, it sees the component parts, it can reason through why it is constructed that way, and it's not just reimagining the whole thing from scratch. And it also, when it means to make an adjustment, it knows it doesn't have to touch everything. It can leave some things alone, and that is a tremendous luxury, and you get so much better results. So certain [00:13:30] files are still understandable enough that they behave like parts. Even if they're not. Instead of doing PowerPoints in some cases, I just have it making me PNG files, just making me images, but they're the block diagrams. This is like a bar chart. And the willingness I have to iterate on that is insane. The willingness to polish that and get it to this point of like near perfection. I would have been exhausted months ago on this one diagram and [00:14:00] instead I'm just like, "Nope, that's not quite it. That's not quite it." And I just keep pressing it.

And because it's able to look at the P and G format and still fit what it's done into its brain. I'm saying things like, "Hey, take 20% off the length of that bar and split that extra length across these other two bars." I'm making those kinds of adjustments in English and I probably went through 13, 14 iterations of that diagram, but if I started building it by hand in PowerPoint, [00:14:30] I'd have gotten committed and that'd have been it.

Justin Mannhard...: If you're involved in advancing the use and integration of AI for yourself or for your company, fight like hell for the right tools to be around that. If you're stuck with something that isn't open to what's coming, depending on what it is, it could be more significant or less significant of a problem. [00:15:00] But I was thinking about the P3 website because I know what it is and I was involved in certain parts of that and I was like, "Man." So it's cool to hear we have a similar thought process of like, "Oh, no, no, no, we're not doing this."

Rob Collie: So there was this initial momentum, like we were going to do something with the website. Well, we need to go do the usual thing. We need to go find a development outfit, whatever. Is it WordPress and all that? And I'm just like, "What are we doing? What are we even doing here?" So [00:15:30] the decision to not go with WordPress ... Wix is one thing. Wix is really low code. WordPress is like the professional version of low code, crazy robust by comparison, but it turns out that the answer to low code was real code all along. Why do I need WordPress? What does WordPress actually do for me? WordPress is a massive, massive, massive industry, and I think it's [00:16:00] dead on the vine.

Justin Mannhard...: Well, the reason it provided value was it gave you an interface that wasn't code and you didn't know how to code. That's over.

Rob Collie: Right. And guess what you get as a result? You get bloat. It's not even as good as the other outcome and it's harder. It's over.

Justin Mannhard...: Look, I have a caveat on this though here. The fact that we did our website ourselves so quickly [00:16:30] is not like a critique on people that are in graphic design profession or developer possession like outright. The reality is we don't have that luxury at the moment. We need to do it ourselves. And so it's really awesome that we can. And I was meeting with someone, I showed them like, "Hey, here's how far we got in a couple of weeks." And they gave me a numbers like, "You would've probably spent this amount of money getting something like this." I was like, "We just don't have that." It wasn't possible.

Rob Collie: Even if it was [00:17:00] free, you wouldn't have the time to do it the way that they would ... You'd be more inclined to pay the number that they mentioned. To get it at the speed that you got it's the same thing over and over again. Getting these crafter types closer and closer to the actual business end and like, boy, we are right up against the sun now.

Justin Mannhard...: Yeah. We've just been building and building and building and it's a lot of fun and talking to people. I think that's that mindset of if you needed something, whether it was an app, a website, a process, [00:17:30] some AI solution, the barrier to that thing existing is so low today. I'm not saying that this is easy because if it was easy, we wouldn't hear about what we're hearing about in our feeds, right? But if you can get clear eyed with the right people, with the right crafter types, you can go fast and far, and it's really exciting to do it.

Rob Collie: So had another run in with nerd non-believers this [00:18:00] weekend, and it got intense, man.

Justin Mannhard...: So I stay grounded. This is just legit don't believe that technology is a thing versus some political stance.

Rob Collie: They're still in the y'all are falling for this hype. It's not as good as you think it is. The world isn't changing. That crowd. And it was a birthday dinner. There's actually multiple Microsoft people in this friend's group sitting next to a Microsoft developer and across the table from a Microsoft developer. [00:18:30] I'm off leash in this environment because I don't really drink alcohol anymore, but I allow myself two drinks when I'm out with friends. And so I had two drinks. I'm just a little bit more open about how amazing I think it is. All this AI stuff, like what my experiences with it. I'm a little bit more open with it as a result because of my tongue being loosened up. I know this audience, we've gone rounds on this before. What's really interesting is that one of the guys, the guy sitting across from me [00:19:00] was a big, big, big naysayer who was just like, we get to the point of like talking down to me like three months ago. He's talking differently now. He has been seeing some things. I can see it behind his eyes now. So when I say something that he would originally have considered outlandish, now I see him pause and think for a moment before jumping me.

And it's not because of me. I didn't change his mind. The world has changed his mind, but he's listening now. This other guy though ain't having it. And it's [00:19:30] his birthday. It's his birthday dinner. And I said something he just couldn't take, couldn't take. So in very dramatic fashion, he gets up and he's going to go to the bathroom. But he's going to get the last word on his way out. He looks at me in front of everyone and says, "That is not true. I can guarantee that's not true." And walks off like he snuffed out a cigarette conversation [00:20:00] over. I sat and I waited. He came back, he sat down, I spun 90 degrees in my chair and faced him and basically said the equivalent of we're going to go."Nope, we're going to really talk now and you're not going to stop talking to me."

Some of the things that came out of this guy's mouth, oh my God. He like showed with his hands like, " Okay, here's LLMs at zero on the chart. Here's ants [00:20:30] at nine. Here's people at 10. Yeah, right." And he keeps trying to pull nerd rank on me. I know how the sausage is made because he's a developer. In his corner of the world ... But he writes like device drivers for hardware. The program managers in his corner of the world frankly just hold his clipboard. What do they do? They're administrators. There isn't any doubt what the spec should be. I press the button, it should send the button press. That's what should happen. [00:21:00] I know how the sausage is made. I'm like, "No, you don't. You don't know anything. You don't know thing one about LLMs. You haven't spent the last year with a gun to your head having your whole future of your profession depend on it." Just awful.

Him like, "You need to listen to this YouTube channel." And he shows me this YouTube channel." This is a physics professor from blah, blah, blah." And he's pointing to this video that says, "This is what one month of ChatGPT does to your brain." And I look, I'm like, "Yeah, I've seen this stuff. I've seen these sorts of people. They are catering to people like you who have your head in the [00:21:30] sand and you eat it up. You just eat it up." He's like, "I'm the only one that gets to talk real and nasty." I'm like, "No, I can do that." I spent like 25 minutes annihilating him. You know that we're never going to be able to tell ever if these things ever became self-aware, right? He's like, "Yeah, I completely agree with that." I'm like, "So you don't know if they haven't already, right? "You just lost the argument, bud. If you don't know when it happens, [00:22:00] if there's no test you can apply ... Well, look, I know you can't test it, but it's not there. I'm not arguing that it is, but this is just over and over and over again, it was just awful. We made it up afterwards. I don't know. We'll see.

Justin Mannhard...: There's interesting camps. There's the nerd non-believer, like this persona, which it probably comes back to self-identity and pride to an extent.

Rob Collie: Also, honestly, just fear.

Justin Mannhard...: That's what I mean. This is how [00:22:30] my sense of myself is so intertwined into this skill that I have that AI is now also very good at. The complete other extreme is the people who, for whatever reason, they're basically still at 2023 ChatGPT level understanding of AI.

Rob Collie: I think those two camps overlap a lot.

Justin Mannhard...: They present their opinions in very different ways. What you're describing as a very determined, convinced, strong ... [00:23:00] There's this blissful ignorance.

Rob Collie: I think it's like ... This mindset I was dealing with at dinner, I think it's like the person who checked in on it once, put it in its box where it was safe and never opened it again. The one thing that I told him that might've made a dent to him, I can't tell. He's a smart guy. He's actually nice. He's not always nice. Okay. He's not always nice. He was not nice that night. And then for the first time he got to see me not be nice. [00:23:30] The thing I told him that I think might've made him think twice was like, "Look, man, a year ago, I believe what you believe, and it's just because that I have been forced to go down this rabbit hole that I'm in a different place and I came out believing something very, very, very different than what I believe when I went in and very, very different from frankly what I wanted to believe." And I think maybe he's noodling on that.

Justin Mannhard...: I relate to that too. When you watch [00:24:00] AI perform at a level that is arguably much better at the things you used to get paid to do, you got to reckon with that.

Rob Collie: Yeah. So I told this story to Jamie and his reaction, it was hilarious. He's like, "So you know what's really funny, Rob? What's really, really, really funny about all this is that you're talking to a professional developer and in the last year you've written way more code than he has That would've been an elbow off the top rope that if I'd [00:24:30] thought of it, I would've used it.

Justin Mannhard...: I don't know. Maybe it still is, but that was always a badge of honor for developers. You just go look at their commit history in their get profile. You go ahead and pull yours out.

Rob Collie: How do you really commit? You do these really granular commits? Oh no, no, no. I got 11 features going into each commit. It's like, "Oh, I haven't committed in a while."

Justin Mannhard...: I have this thing that I have that I use every day locally, I'm like, "It's never pushed back up to [00:25:00] the remote." I asked Claude the other day, I was like, "So what's the situation?" It's like, "Yeah, you're way out of sync." Because I wanted to share this system with somebody and I was like, "Oh, I can share that." And I was like, "Oh." Well, this was one, like you were saying, I wanted to move it over to the Mac and I was like, "Oh."

Rob Collie: Oh, no, trouble. Danger Will Robinson.

Justin Mannhard...: I don't know. The way things get done is very different. And [00:25:30] I think when people hold out for whatever reason, but if you're on the fence, take an interest in whatever way is most accessible to you at the moment because most people, their experience in the workplace especially paces a good measure behind where the technology really is.

Rob Collie: It moves like a glacier slowly and then all at once, right? We're approaching, I think, one of those all at once moments. And all these arguments are [00:26:00] over in a year. Dude sitting next to me at dinner is either going to be like, "Well, I'm not working anymore." Or he's going to be like, "I knew it all along."

Justin Mannhard...: I'll go with the ladder based on your description.

Rob Collie: Yeah. It's so funny. He doesn't even know that he's sitting next to someone who's 175 pages into writing a book about AI, but I haven't even told him that. He has no idea. [00:26:30] He's so funny. He's talking down to me about, "I don't know anything." And he's saying things that aren't true. They can only do things that they've already done. I'm like, "No, you can put a brand new tool in front of these things and it's off and running in an instant." Wrong, just factually wrong. Tell me how the sausage is made again.

Justin Mannhard...: So 175 pages, what are we putting that as a percentage?

Rob Collie: Jesus. I don't know. This is actually another joke that Jamie made the other day. He was like, "We're going to start an over and under on how many times Rob [00:27:00] labels himself 75% done." I don't know, honestly. The way I write ... Tarantino one time said that he didn't know Mr. Blonde had a razor blade in his boot until he pulled it out. There's a little bit of that, like discovering the road. Just this morning, I'm having a chat with Eddie, my Cowork opus editor that I've created over time. And we decided ... We ... When you say the word we [00:27:30] decided that it was time to take chapter 10 and split it into two chapters and restructure it. So you got to leave room for the discovery, like the iteration process. One point in time, Eddie and I are talking ... Me and Eddie, me and my editor. Eddie is now, by the way, the first word in the book. The first sentence in the book is in quotes. "Eddie did not write this book." But I did have a superhero sitting next to me and I made the superhero and it's wild. [00:28:00] Anyway, I don't know what percentage it is. Another movie quote, "Fights go on as long as they have to." Welcome to book club. Only one book at a time, fellas. Books print in multiples of 16 pages.

Justin Mannhard...: I know all about this.

Rob Collie: You know all about this. You're one of the handful of people I can talk to in the world that already knows this. I know this, Rob.

Justin Mannhard...: My first job after college was running the binder at a facility that [00:28:30] if you wanted your book printed in a short run and sent out to people to read it, we did that. So if you wanted like 50 copies of the book and sent out to a test group.

Rob Collie: Was that a hard cover bindery or soft cover?

Justin Mannhard...: Yeah. We did soft covers and then we did stitching for like magazines.

Rob Collie: I can't believe we've never connected over this. Maybe we have. Do you know that in like 2012, I put a video on YouTube that was my first book being printed.

Justin Mannhard...: I've seen that.

Rob Collie: Literally the very, very first run I was there. [00:29:00] They'd already printed all the pages. I was there for the assembly of the pages and the gluing of the covers and the trimming and even all the way to the boxing. It was wild.

Justin Mannhard...: Very important to follow the process. Some of the mistakes you see on a production floor like that are pretty interesting. You get a book that's got all page one and two just ...

Rob Collie: Oh yeah. One mistake could just be financially devastating. I believe it.

Justin Mannhard...: On the floor, quality control is really important, but it's like, "Oh, my job is to do the cut the way I [00:29:30] do the cut." And then I hand it over to ... And it gets bound and then it gets three knifed into its final form and then someone finally flips through the pages and goes, "Wait a minute."

Rob Collie: For high-tech nerds to be around something so physical, there was something really, really cool about it. Just the enormous volume of paper that was loaded up in these shoots. That's just unbelievable. Anyway, so multiples of 16 pages. Bill and I have been saying, "Oh, we should try to get it into 256." I called Bill this morning. I'm like, "I'm not sure 256. [00:30:00] We're going to need another 16, so we'll see. I would say more than half. I can't imagine this being a 350-page book. We're past the intermission. There is an intermission and we're past it.

Justin Mannhard...: From henceforth on Raw Data with Rob Collie, we will check in on how many days has he still been sick and how many pages of the book are written?

Rob Collie: Those are the two KPIs, right? Congratulations on the new website.

Justin Mannhard...: Thank you.

Rob Collie: Congratulations [00:30:30] on the methodology.

Justin Mannhard...: It's a very fortunate spot, like I said, to be able to make those choices. It's enabling us to move fast and do the things we want to do, and it's been a lot of fun.

Rob Collie: If you were doing this with GPT 3.5, yuck.

Justin Mannhard...: Yeah. We would've probably given up.

Rob Collie: All right. Well, have a great week.

Justin Mannhard...: Sounds good, man.