Time to talk about AI and Life #aiassisted

Good morning, LinkedIn, friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First AI Daily, your collaborative intelligence report. It is Friday, February 20, 2026. How we doing, fellas?

We're doing good. Doing good for the. Landed nicely for the end of the week. Nice amount of news this week. Not too overwhelming, but it's definitely. Each week is definitely heavier news than like the previous week, for sure. Like, it just keeps compounding at this point.

Well, Chris, since you asked me how I'm doing and not how the world's doing, I'll let you know that I'm. I'm dragging today, but I'm great. And, and it's weird to say that, but it was a late night last night. I couldn't shut it down. I had to keep going. It was just too good. And then finally I looked at my wife. I gave her a kiss and I'm like, I'm about to pass out. And then this morning came and I'm like, oh, what did I do? But I'm ready for another day and I'm ready to rock and roll.

And I'm confident you're going to recover quickly, especially with the conversation that we're about to have. Yeah, I wish I could bottle that up and be like, that's the value prop you're investing in. If you unlock all of your employees.

Yeah.

To be able to work like this. I'm having a couple conversations on Monday with active clients who, because coaching is a large part of. It's. I mean, when I have it my way, it's the only part of what I'm delivering and helping people figure things out in their own way for their own situations. And now talk about AI a lot, obviously. And if they open the door, this is like little bitty millimeter. We're getting AI Native activated in that session. So the conversations that are being had on Monday are leaders joining, you know, the usual coaching call to learn more about, you know, I'm what I'm calling the AI Native shift and AI Native activation. Yeah. But. And I think it's. It'll be clear with this comparison that they have asked about directly. Right. For one of the sessions. And that's they've got some people in the org that have used lovable to build some apps that were immediately impactful to their team as like a management just to build out a dashboard so, like, everybody could know what everybody else is doing and they put it up on a tv and it was great for that manager. But then another person on the team and who happens to Be the leader of the team tech stack and systems who I'm coaching. Trying to take him in the direction of like you're going to own AI for your organization. We've unlocked him to start building out a self service portal. Right. That was. Was on our roadmap as the person that's helping them do implementation work. Right. And that was through cloud code and GitHub and Vercel and the stack that we love to talk about and that I know the three of us use all day, every day at this point. And they want to understand the difference between using Lovable to build and using our AI native tech stack to build. Where would you guys start with that conversation?

Nico, I'll let you go first on this because I don't know. Okay.

See them as two different directions.

Yeah.

So like, you know, lovable is the stepping stone to the tech stack that we use. I think if you're trying to. I don't even think you need lovable. Right. We've talked about this a lot that 9 out of 10, like 9.9 out of 10 times. It's just a matter of like right now what we do all the time is we show people the magic trick and everybody loves the. Everybody loves a magic trick and they love illusions. And the difference with this is when we show you how the magic trick works, your head explodes. It's not a matter like normally you see how an illusion happens or how a magic trick works and you're disappointed and you're, oh, well, I thought it might be something like that this time. You find out and it's just like, wow, okay, what magic can I do now? I bet you I can do something cool with that too. Right. Like imagine like that's the best way that I can explain it to you because of the fact that it's not intelligence gated, that it's just a matter of action. It's just a matter of taking action. You don't actually have to know all of the things related to the thing that you're trying to do. It's. It's like being able to ask for a car and just getting it without having to know how to be a mechanic and an engineer and how to be a modeler to put the body together, all that kind of stuff. Right. So I think Lovable is definitely a great place to start. It's a really good starting point if you really know you want to do it. Right. Like you're unabashed about it. I think it's easy enough to start in like Gemini I really recommend Gemini because of the fact that it's free and it works really nice and pretty flawlessly. Mainly just because of the fact that you can, like, see, play around. You don't have to pay for anything. You're not worried about like uploading or committing or any of that kind of stuff. Lovable definitely takes you to the next level where, okay, now I have this thing. I can host it, I can share it with other people and oh, what's Super Base or Supabase, Right? Like, I look at it, I think of Vibe coding and learning Vibe coding in those, in those steps of like, how much do you have to use to do the thing you want to do? Is it just a regular web app that, like, you just. It's a timer or it's something, you know, even a data extraction thing or data enhancing thing. None of those require, like AI models and they don't require back end. Like, they're all just front end run things, right? So it's like you can just build them in any vibe. Any Vibe coding, you can build them in any AI model app. Now any AI chatbot will build apps for you. Now you don't need a vibe coding software anymore. That's not a thing anymore. Yeah, they all do it, right?

I. I feel like there's so many things going around in my brain right now. One, I feel like I skipped a phase. What I mean by that? Oh, yeah, I never used lovable and I really never used replit. I never really, like, I never did these things that people go into when they're starting do that. And what's, what's really interesting about that is two, two lanes that I want to drive down for this conversation that we're having. One, I had a client three days ago slack me and say, hey, my boss wants to use Codex and I don't want to get left behind. Is there any way that you can show me Codex or cloud code? And I was like, oh, absolutely, I got your back. Like, I'll show you, like the basics. And then I was like, oh, crap. Like, I used Codex and Claude code in terminal.

How.

How do I teach her in a way that she can go forward? And I, I had to pause. I had to pause. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm gonna show her the way that I do it and she can go that route. And here's the second road that I want to run down because of my response to that. I got the opportunity yesterday to talk to a super dope HubSpot employee, they're the researcher for sales hub and they wanted to talk to me about AI and sales and we had a fantastic conversation. But gentlemen, have you ever said something that surprises the out of yourself? You're like, did that just come out of my mouth? And I said these words, I said, what you need to understand insert person's name is is that Terminal is not nerdy. You see, terminal used to be nerdy. Terminal used to be python. Terminal used to be this thing. But now if the human will just adjust their mind that terminal is a way to communicate. Terminal is not nerdy. And her eyes and her response to me saying that and then talking about the use cases of what I've done in terminal to talk to HubSpot throughout my sales processes, she was like, holy crap, can I share this with my bosses? And I was like, wait a second. I don't think what I do is complex, but on this side it's mind blowing. But on my client side I'm fearful that what I do is complex and how am I gonna teach her? And so you have to understand like a lot of this game, and I don't mean game and like you're playing a game like the SEO gamer, like, but part of this game of life, part of this game of AI is like the mindsets that you allow yourself to invoke in yourself to move forward to the thing that you want to do or the place that you want to go. And so like, do I love teaching it? Yes. Do sometimes I wonder how in God's name am I teaching it? And how do I get. Yes. Do I think that there are people that I look at and go, man, they got to be way past me. And all of a sudden I realize, holy crap, they're not. And, and so these are all like fears and thoughts and things that I think all of us as humans probably have. And I chose the, the kind of thing of two lanes, two roads. Because what I figured out and kind of the answer to your question is there's no right or wrong way. It's your road. Pick your freaking road and just drive down it. Just do it.

Right. I think that's fair for individuals.

Yes.

I think right inside of an organization, right, there's some choices to make, I think. And one choice, like those paths can, can go dramatically at different speeds for your org, right? And the way that I think we can simplify it and I'm going to show some examples like I've. And I only use replit one time. Right? Never use lovable Right. But when I tried to do that, you know, Ryan Ginsburg was telling me how awesome it was. I was been using Claude Desktop for a while, hadn't touched coding yet, but Claude was starting to build apps. Right. And I was getting to that point, like, man, how can I host one of these? Like, I see everybody else sharing this stuff. Like, how can I get out of the cloud instance. Right. And into the world.

Yeah.

And initially it was like, okay, I like HubSpot CMS. Let's try to figure out how to do that. That wasn't working very well. And then that brought me to replit and like, my working style is to not figure everything out up front and back then. Right. I know they're a lot better now, but back then, if you didn't have a fairly clear picture and prompt and like Endpoint, because it was designed to give you to proof of concept, like very quickly. Right. Or even like finished product in a way that you haven't been able to before. But when I tried to like Flex inside of that, oh, what about this? What about this? Like, I wasn't getting the results. And after lots of conversations with Nikos, it was clear why. Right. But that's where it wasn't a fit for me. And I think that kind of like, if you have a clear picture, like for their use case, they knew what that dashboard needed to look like on the wall. Right. For their team to understand what they needed to get done. Like, as a repair manager, he had a very, very clear problem and a great idea for the solution. Right. I see Claude code and the AI native stack as more of like a work partner. Right. That you can bring in to any part of your workflow and when you can do that. So instead of building apps, we're auto coding to help create, help solve problems and get work done. Right. In the context of an organization. Right. And when you can unlock it in that way, like, here's an example of, of what I'm working on this morning. Yeah, right. Like the Flex, the ability to just take any idea or any challenge or anything that comes to mind instead of brainstorming.

After you share yours, I will, I'll share mine. Because I anyway, go for it.

Right. And come back to this. But to George's point, and a lot of people are saying this right now, like, mindset is first. Right. That's the goal of the conversations on Monday, is to make sure, like the mindset is available. This could happen for our organization. Like, if you cannot get there as a leader, like, yeah, you can Activate various people. But unless you start to build it in as infrastructure, you're not going to see the gains you could. You'll still see some gains. But what I did this morning, right after I had already activated sessions with Claude Code and the ide, I was on a walk and I was listening to the latest Moonshots episode and they kept talking about self, self improvement, recursive self improvement. Already here, right? Already available. So I pull out my phone, I start talking to Gemini, I say, hey, here's my tech stack. What's the best way to start building recursive self improvement into this tech stack, right? He gives me an answer, I say, hey, how about a research plan with a prompt for Claude code to start building this out? By the end of my walk, research plan is done, I come back in, sit down and I say, hey, V, I want you and Pax and Sage to check out this plan and do some research of your own from the perspective of our environment, our business, and see how this could be applicable to our business and then create that plan, right? And now I'm, you know, probably one enter stroke away from starting to execute the plan and starting to build continuously into this infrastructure, right? And that kind of just work collab, literally collaborating while also building out additional infrastructure that should not be thought of as apps in my opinion, right? Like skills and additional agents and new layers of infrastructure for an organization like 100x. Difference in my opinion from, you know, one of the app building apps, right? Which again, great for proof of concept, great for to get to a finished product if that's all you want to do. But I think in the cases of most businesses where there is opportunity is just helping people get through the day to day, right? And I was having a conversation yesterday because everybody's worried about the scary, the scariness of what I'm showing here, this ide, this terminal, right? Imagine if this was Slack and you came to Slack to do a very similar thing where I'm clicking into this place where I type a message so that I can ask George or Nico a question because I need help with something, right? And then they come back, probably at this point they tell me to go ask AI, but they might come back and give, give a response, right? In, in a very similar way to like this book when, when we get passionate about the answer. So imagine if now AI is on the table and now this is just like Slack, or maybe it's even built into Slack, right? Like it's 100% mindset getting in the way of that Possibility when you suggest that people cannot. Anybody on the team cannot start using a tool like this.

Yeah.

And I think that's where the goal of Monday and any conversation is like, leader, can I get you in the mindset to trust that? And then it becomes like any other decision that a leader has to make. It's like, oh, we use Microsoft and PCs at our business. So I'm sorry that you might be used to Apple and Macs, but if you work here, you got to learn how to use Windows and PCs and Microsoft apps. Right. You don't get a choice. And I say that part. Some people will latch onto this stuff very quickly, but from a leader's perspective, for others, you're gonna have to mandate this kind of infrastructure shift. Right. Because it is foreign. Nobody's ever done it before. It's very hard to find information that you can easily apply to your specific mode of work. Right. But I think so that's, I think how I'm going to break it down in terms of just this like lovable and those kinds of tools and even inside the LLM great to get a. Get to a proof of concept and even working like app that you could probably start making money on like pretty quickly versus do you want to build like infrastructure for your organization and AI as a com as a collaborator with everybody on the team. Easy peasy, right?

That's right.

So you're reminding me of a couple things. One, because you're talking mindsets and you've used the word leaders that you're going to be talking to for Monday. I was just watching a Gary V video and he was talking about how there's going to be organizations that are really sad in the next two, four, six years because they're playing a or game humans or AI. And his point is that people real quickly need to realize that the power is in the. And it's humans and AI.

It's.

It's collaborative and it's communication. Like you said Slack. Yeah, it can be in Slack. You can put it in Slack. You put it almost anywhere you want. I mean, I've got Echo tied into Telegram at this point. Right. So I can be sitting in my living room and get Echo to do something. Like if you want to communicate it with, you can find plenty of ways to communicate with it. The second thing where you took my brain is I am so thankful that I am not in an organization has to worry about 10,000 layers of IT and security to be able to do the thing. Like there's this, there's there's something. And I don't know how we do it, but historically it's been okay. It's been acceptable for enterprise level companies to be slow due to process around security and it. And like there's like, there's just this, there's always this wall. And I know it's for a good reason or historically it was for a good reason. I don't know how many people out there are addressing the fact if it's still a needed good reason, if it needs to be as tight as. And again, I'm not, I'm not a security expert, I'm not an IT guy, but I've seen where people have tried to do the simplest things and they're like, oh yeah, my organization doesn't let me do that. I have to use Copilot. And I'm like, what? What? Like, are you kidding me? And, and so what I would, what I would hope doesn't come up, but if it does that, you can address it. Chris, is this idea of like, how do you relieve yourself of this self created handcuffs that your organization may have that need to be shed so that the new mindsets can thrive as they move forward? I don't, I don't know, but I'm just.

Yeah, that's why like value first. Like when you can focus on that, like you just start pulling stuff out of the way of people that you're asking to do valuable things, you know, for your organization. And some leaders, like if you're one of those leaders that are saying, hey guys, I need you to figure out how to use AI to help you get work done and then you give them access to a tool like Copilot and say they can't use anything else. Right. To put it nicely, you could be doing better for your people. Yeah, right. And it's your job, I think any CEO, like set the vision, communicate the vision, resource the organization.

Yeah.

And if you are not bringing AI in as an infrastructure of the organization as soon as possible, you are not resourcing your organization effectively right now.

See, and I, I would, I would even go a step further than that because you're talking about resourcing your organization. I would even say because of this conversation around AIs, how are you also resources or helping the humans that you serve? Let me give you an example. I. Last night my, my family was kind of laughing because I came out of my office and was like, and I don't do this very often. But I was like, oh my God, you guys are not gonna believe this. I Can't even believe that this just happened. And there was a thing that was a suggestion that somebody gave me, I had them do an audit and they were like, wouldn't it be cool if. And I love wouldn't it be cool if like, is it possible? But I looked at these two little things and I was like, man, I don't know. But I also looked at these two little things and I was like, but imagine being the user, imagine. And like you're trying to collect these things because you're like having a hard time with something. You're trying to learn something. And so last night I sat in my office again, late night, but it's worth it. And created the ability to. And I don't mean bookmark like in your browser, but like bookmark an article and then it goes, and it goes in like a card, a container in your members dashboard or even be able to highlight the screen and like highlight a section, a paragraph, a scripture or whatever. And then there's another card where all of those highlights are saved. And when you click on the bookmark or you click on the highlight, it takes you back to the place where it actually was. And when I got done and I started using it, I was like, I do not believe this is an actual feature that is on this site. Like, this isn't. This is crazy. And, but it's a value add to the humans. Of course it immediately got placed on like the, you know, card, the pricing cards, like, hey, show that that's in there. But it's a, it's a feature that probably so many websites, so many platforms don't have, but a feature that so many humans, if they're trying to collect and educate and fix and solve a thing in their life need. And so it's just this idea of how do you enable yourself or the humans in your organization to be able to create going back to Nico, the magic tricks and to go back to Dharmesh and inbound that delight the crap out of the humans that you're serving. Like that's that for me, that's where the magic is, is like creating these moments of delight for humans based on the journey of being assisted with AI.

Yeah. Inside and outside of the organization. Right. Like, yeah. Any, Any final thoughts? We wrap up Nico?

No, honestly, you guys very much covered it.

Well, we'll be back on Monday where I might ask any more questions. But I do think it's a simple, I mean the mindset part, right? Like if, if we can't unlock that, like none of the rest is possible. It's a very complex, you know, situation that we're talking about that becomes very, very much simplified when you can align humans on what's actually possible and what could be achieved with this new layer added to your organization. So with that, everybody have a great Friday and a great weekend. We'll see you next time.

Peace out.