A 3-step AI coding workflow for solo founders | Ryan Carson (5x founder)

I think the biggest mistake that I do that everyone does is they try to rush through the context where you just don't have the patience to tell the AI what it actually needs to know to solve your problem. And I think if we all just slow down a tiny bit and do these 2 steps, it speeds everything up. Nobody really knows how to do this stuff. The only way you're really gonna figure it out is by getting in here and getting your hands dirty and see what works.

That's a place where so many engineers and product managers get stuck in a loop, like who's gonna take this PRD and actually break it down in the right steps? So even just this, This is such a time saver for people building products.

Building this new startup, I literally feel like I'm able to do all of it. Am I able to do it as well as a dedicated product manager? No. Am I able to think as deeply as a CTO? No. But I am able for sure to build this company.

This is the way, people. I'm telling you, pay attention. Welcome to How I AI. I'm Claire, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. 2025 is definitely the year of the vibe coder, but you can't always vibe your way to a scalable execution strategy. In this episode, Ryan Carson, a 5-time founder with 20 years experience, shows us how he brings PRDs, task lists, and some advanced prompting techniques to Cursor to make sure he's not just vibing, he's building the right things. Let's get to it. Today's episode is brought to you by ChatPRD. I know that many of you are tuning into How I AI to learn practical ways you can apply AI AI and make it easier to build. That's exactly why I built ChatPRD. ChatPRD is an AI copilot that helps you write great product docs, automate tedious coordination work, and get strategic coaching from an expert AI CPO. And it's loved by everyone from the fastest growing AI startups to large enterprises with hundreds of PMs. Whether you're trying to vibe code a prototype, teach a first-time PM the ropes, or scale efficiently in a large organization, ChatPRD helps you do better work fast, and we're integrated with the tools you love: v0.dev, Google Drive, Slack, Linear, Confluence, and more, so you don't have to change your workflow to accelerate with AI. Try ChatPRD free at chatprd.ai/howiai, and let's make product fun again. Hey Ryan, it's nice to have you here.

Thanks. It's exciting to be here. I've listened to every episode so far. And I'm honored to be here myself. I can't wait.

So I'm gonna start with an easy question, which is, what are the last 3 things you built with AI?

I don't know if you call constantly using ChatGPT with your kids building something in AI, but I feel like, I feel like I'm the constant AI coach in our family, and I'm always delighted actually with what our kids are doing. And because of that, um, my amazing 14-year-old kiddo, Devin, he said, Dad, like, you know, I've been thinking about this game. And I said, well, like, let's build it. And so we're building a, a primitive little side scroller and he's like the creative director. So, uh, oh, that's so fun. So that's sort of thing 1 and thing 2. Mm-hmm. I would say thing 3 is the startup I'm building, which is just this huge amount of work where I'm coding. But then there's just all sorts of little quick things of vibe code, you know, all the time. So all day, every day.

All day, every day, ChatGPT and vibe coding. I'm gonna make us all t-shirts and have us go out saying that.

This is not the t-shirt.

Okay. So one of the things that I think you do really well compared to other vibe coders is you bring some structure to the process. You're, you're quite wise about how you use Cursor. And so I'd love for you to pull up your screen and show us how you get Cursor to follow a plan.

Let's do it. So the reason why, uh, I do this is because I've been coding and coding, coding with AI, and you just learn as you do this that you really have to get good about context, what you're showing the AI, what you're asking the AI to do, and you end up cutting back all the things you're doing to a manageable amount of things that the AI can actually do. So the process I'm gonna show you, I'm in Cursor now, in case you're listening to the show, you can download it for free at cursor.com. Uh, it's basically a VS Code fork, right? So if you ever use VS Code, it's a great tool. So what I've done here is opened up a, a basic project that I vibe coded yesterday just to kind of show you what's going on. This is a, a stupid little CRM tool for a yacht club, cuz I thought that would be kind of funny. So, so there's that. So, all right. So say that you wanna make a change in here and it's a bigger change than just a small, uh, you know, a, a quick Hey, we changed this thing, say it's larger. All right. So you would probably want to create a product requirement doc, right? Like PRD. And, and if you're watching the show and you don't know about Claire's Chat PRD, absolutely check it out cuz it's amazing. But if you need a lighter lift, then here's what I do. So I've created 3 files over here in my cursor rules folder.

Mm-hmm.

And I'll walk you through what they do and how they work. I've also open sourced these. And so we can throw those, uh, a link in the show notes for you all to grab that.

Great.

So the first one is a simple, uh, instruction for the AI to create a product requirement docs. Uh, again, Claire knows everything about this and lives this and breathes this, but to a lot of people that don't know about PRDs, right? It's, it's how you describe a feature that you're wanting to build. And so this rule explains to the AI how to write a PRD for the user. So, the way you use this is, is very simple, right? So, I'm gonna go over.

And I wanna pause really quickly because I love your initial prompt, which says, this is a PRD that's suitable for a junior developer to understand and implement this feature. That's such an interesting little callout.

Yeah, well spotted. Because again, the, as you code and code and code with AIs, you, you start to realize that they're like a genius PhD student, right? But, but they, they can't seem to connect these really simple, obvious things that you and I know. And so saying junior developer is kind of a way to instruct the AI, let's keep this at the, at a certain level.

Yep.

You know, we've got some process, we've got some clarifying questions. Uh, you'll see this in action. I'll actually run it.

Great.

So let's do that.

Great.

So I'm gonna @include this file, which puts it in the context window. And then I'm going to give it a simple instruction, which I've pre-written, which is I'd like to add a report that shows me all the boat names of members and how many emails they've been sent. This is a big deal if you're in a yacht club.

You have a lot more fun use cases than I do for live coding.

I try, you know. So let's see what happens. So I'm going to go and hit go. We're in agent mode. For those of you who are astute, you'll notice I'm using Claude. Uh, 3.7 Sonnet in Max mode. I actually tend to use, uh, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and it's funny, I didn't notice that I had selected that, but fine.

I'm now a default 0.3 girl.

Ooh.

Ooh. We'll have to talk. Yeah. And then when 0.3 gets stalled out, I go to 3.7 Sonnet.

Right, right. It's funny. I'm pretty much default, uh, Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Mm-hmm.

I love the Max mode. It is sort of expensive. I probably spend maybe $300, $400 a month. But, you know, worth it. I think that's okay. Okay, so what we've got here is the AI came back and gave us some clarifying questions on the PRD. I'm going to answer a couple of these just to show you how this works. So if you're listening along, the AI has said, okay, great, I'll help you create a PRD. I have a couple questions for you. The first one is, what is the problem this report is trying to solve? Well, we are— what problem is this? We're trying to give visibility into how many emails people are getting, right? All right, so that's thing one. Let's go, let's answer the second one. Who specifically will be using the report? All right, we'll say admins. Where should this report be accessible? You pick. And so there's a couple, I would say there's probably too many questions in here, but one of these things again that I want everyone watching to kind of get used to is you'll notice in this PRD rule file, I've done something specific here where I've said, I want these questions to be dot notation where it's 2.1 and 2.2, because you end up— otherwise the AI would just give you a bunch of questions and it would put, it would put more than one question in a bullet point and it becomes hard to use. So you kind of get used to this specificity, right? So I'm just gonna, uh, I'm gonna say the rest, make your best judgment.

I do the exact same prompt. I say, you pick whatever you think is best.

Like, Yeah, cuz I'm kind of lazy, right? So, all right, so let's do that. So it's gonna fire up and start creating this PRD. Now what I've chosen is, is, you know, over here I've got a task folder. Mm-hmm. It put the PRD in there and then we're gonna generate a list of tasks in a minute. So it says, okay, great. Uh, I'll now create it and it's generating it. So that will happen in a minute. I'm gonna actually nip over, uh, to my browser cuz I do wanna show you a couple other interesting things.

Mm-hmm.

Um, so first of all, this is my amazing yacht club member app that we just vibe coded. Now we're gonna pop this in the link, but this is, uh, the, uh, repo that has these prompts in it. We'll give those to you. But there's this really cool open source tool called Taskmaster. This is open source, it's completely free, and it's like a hyped up version of what I'm showing you. So it's, it runs in, uh, as a command line interface tool. It's great. It, it's actually was too much for me.

Yeah.

I, I wanted less. Uh, less power, less control, or less power, more control. So this is a, a great alternative to that. So I'm gonna head back into Cursor.

Just to kind of recap where we are so far. So you have a cursor rules files that gives, uh, rules and instructions for generating a PRD. You generate the PRD in agent mode using whatever your preferred model is. That puts that PRD markdown file in a tasks folder that you've put in In your repo, and now we're going to look at that PRD and show how you work through it to build something.

Exactly. Okay. You're a good student. So here is our PRD. It's pretty straightforward if you've ever looked at a PRD. Um, I'm going to show you. So you've got functional requirements, uh, non-goals, design considerations, et cetera. Right. And let's back up. Like, what are we doing here? What we're doing is making it clear. to the large language model what we want done. I think the biggest mistake that I do, that everyone does, is they try to rush through the context where you just don't have the patience to tell the AI what it actually needs to know to solve your problem. And I think if we all just slow down a tiny bit and do these 2 steps, it speeds everything up, right? So we've got a PRD. It's not rocket science here. Now, next, what we want to do is generate tasks for this. So, let's go and generate the task based off this PRD. So, if you're listening, I'm back in Cursor and I'm including the file that generates the task. It's called Generate Tasks. And I'm going to say, please generate the tasks. Tasks for, and then I'm going to tag the PRD.

Got it. So, this is another rule, probably similar to your Generate PRD. One that explains what a task is and how to do it well, and then you're giving it the context of the PRD itself.

Exactly. So let's have a quick look at the generate task list. So the goal is to guide an AI assistant in creating a detailed step-by-step task list. This is what it, what I want the list to look like. This is the process. You'll see it's gonna ask me a couple questions and then it's gonna pump out, uh, tasks in this format as a markdown file.

I have to ask, how did you create these rules? These, the, it's a lovely prompt. It's well structured. It's clear. How did you get good at writing these instructions prompts?

The same way you did. Basically, I tried a couple things. Yeah. They didn't work. I got more specific. And then of course, you know, I had a very intelligent LLM write this for me. Yep. And then I edited it. You know, you, again, you sort of learn some of the tricks of the trade, like I want this task list to be in Markdown and I want, I want there to be checkboxes so that we can check them off. I mean, silly stuff like that. So the biggest thing I want people to walk away from this show is, you know what, nobody really knows how to do this stuff. The only way you're really gonna figure it out is by getting in here and getting your hands dirty and see what works. Um, and then stick with a model that you consistently like. Like I'm getting to know Gemini 2.5 Pro really well, like. What it's good at, what it's not good at. So let's see what it's good at. All right. So I just said, please generate tasks for this PRD. I tagged the file. Uh, we're using a reasoning model, so we're seeing, uh, the thinking tokens kind of whiz by.

And all this thinking might cost you a little bit more, but you get a little bit more visibility, you learn more, and looks like it's doing a good job.

Amen. Yeah, I, I feel like for the extra 5 cents. Like, this is absolutely worth it. Um, so in, in this instruction, it, it, the instruction is give me some basic tasks and then ask me if they're okay and then tell me to go to proceed. So you'll see it says ready to generate the subtasks. Uh, respond with go to proceed.

You know, as I'm looking at this side by side, what I really like about your generate tasks instructions is you've given it in a very explicit process. It's you get this file, you do step 1, you get this next step, next file. And it's not quite an agent, but it really brings in this like agentic thinking of where are the decision points, where are the user interaction points. Um, but in sort of more this linear, um, step-by-step chat mode.

Exactly. And I have been hounding the Cursor team nonstop, like, why don't you just build this into the core developer experience of the app? I, I don't understand why this isn't just the way you use Cursor. And they keep saying, we're doing it. So.

You know, and, and for those listening, that delightful boo-doo is when Cursor, Cursor is done generating.

Isn't that the best? I love that.

I love it. This episode is brought to you by Notion. Notion is now your do-everything AI tool for work. With new AI meeting notes, enterprise search, and research mode, everyone on your team gets a note-taker, researcher, doc drafter, brainstormer. Your new AI team is here, right where your team already works. I've been a longtime Notion user and have been using the new Notion AI features for the last few weeks. I can't imagine working without them. AI meeting notes are a game changer. The summaries are accurate and extracting action items is super useful for standups, team meetings, one-on-ones, customer interviews, and yes, podcast prep. Notion's AI meeting notes are now an essential part of my team's workflow. The fastest growing companies like OpenAI, Ramp, Vercel, and Cursor all use Notion to get more done. Try all of Notion's new AI features for free by signing up with your work email at notion.com/howiai.

So we're gonna accept those changes. We're gonna hop over here and let's just kind of see what it did, right? So, uh, oh wow. I know it's fun, isn't it? So. What you've got up here is the relevant files. Now, this is a trick I learned from a friend on X where my thinking here is that this should help the LLM just remember what files are we really focusing on. Even though I will specifically tag these in the context, uh, I, I think it's helpful. One of the things I want to, uh, briefly touch in, I probably anthropomorphize LLMs probably too much. But, but because they're trained on human output on the web, You know, my belief is we need to give LLMs like the right context and be as helpful as we can so they can actually solve our problems. Right.

I, I completely agree. I'm also very polite to, to the LLMs. It's how I get people to, people to do work. It's how I'm gonna get the agents to do work.

Right. So why wouldn't you, you know, be, treat an agent like you would treat a human? I, that's the way I do it. So. Yeah, I agree. All right. So then we've got, you know, pretty detailed list of tasks, right? We've got 1, 2, 3. 4 with subtasks. Some, we've even got sub-subtasks here, and then we're gonna start iterating on this. So here's how it works. I've got another rule called task list, which probably I need to rename, cuz that doesn't really make sense, but this is the instructions for iterating through these tasks. So I'll kind of walk you through that. So this is task list management. These are guidelines for managing task lists in Markdown files to track progress. The task completion, we have a, uh, we want to do one subtask at a time. Like, this is really important that the, the AI doesn't start trying to do all the tasks. Uh, when you finish a subtask, immediately mark it as complete. And then you'll see I say stop after each subtask, uh, and wait for the user's go ahead. And then it's just a little bit more, uh, clear clarity here.

If people see me shaking my head, it's because I am realizing now I'm using Cursor like such an amateur.

That's so I doubt that.

This is so good. I'm just floating through the ether saying, you know, O3, take me away. And maybe I'm, I'm overconfident in my product management skills. And so I'm putting this all into the chat, but this is, this is the way, people. I'm telling you, pay attention.

I appreciate that. I mean, I think the answer is yes to both those. I mean, sometimes you do just need to roll and see what happens, but I'm learning over and over that if I don't follow this process, I end up down some rabbit hole and I have to revert, right? So let's, let's go ahead and continue here. I'm, what I'm doing now is I'm tagging the task list rule, which tells the AI how to act. And then I'm gonna say, let's start. And then I'm gonna tag the, uh, the tasks.

The task list.

Yeah.

Which is, uh, so we got a PRD, we got a task list, and now we have a set of rules. That knows how to work through a task list and actually get work done.

It does. Exactly. So, all right, so let's start. It's gonna think about it and it's looking through this big list of tasks right now. And so what it's saying is, okay, let's start with the first subtask. Define Prisma schema for email campaign. I'll start by reading the existing Prisma campaign. Okay. Existing blah, blah, blah. You know, so it's just thinking it through. And boom, it has checked off 1.1.

Oh, with a delightful noise. I have a question. Are you, are you hooking it all into Git? How are you doing sort of the change management here?

Yep. So what I tend to do is I will commit after I, after I finish either one of the bullet, one of the, one of the parent tasks. If I, if I feel like the app is in a state that it's workable.

Yep.

I will commit at that point.

Got it.

If I don't, I won't commit until all of these tasks are done.

Oh, wow.

Which, you know, is probably, you know, half a day of work. You know, you kind of get used to like, oh, all right, if I had to revert now, you know, how bad would it be?

Yep.

And then I try to think about, well, what would I need to undo? So it said, All right. Shall I proceed with subtask 1.2? And I'm gonna say, uh, yes. Sometimes I'm really lazy and I just say Y, as in the letter Y. So it's just gonna keep working. Now we don't need to go through this whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but I just wanted to show, uh, all of your amazing listeners and audience, this is a pretty easy process to follow and I've built huge features with this. I mean, you know, 10,000 lines of code reliably and almost never had trouble. I still feel like this human-in-the-loop part is really important where after each task you are kind of checking what's happening. I've noticed that it often does introduce some small problem or there's a linter, um, you know, error, uh, and then you gotta go fix it. So.

And, you know, this is great to get the actual engineering work done, but if I just take a step back for product managers out there that don't know where to get started with Cursor. Even if you just did the PRD task list part, I'm looking at this task list right now and it's got basically like epics and tasks in it. And that's a place where so many engineers and product managers get stuck in a loop, like who's gonna take this PRD and actually break it down in the right steps that are gonna work in our code base. So even just this is such a time saver for people. Building products.

I think so. And now you can over-engineer this process. You know, this is literally a Markdown file. Yeah. Um, it's somewhat hand-cranked. You know, I thought, oh, maybe I'll use, you know, Asana's MCP, you know, server and create Asana tasks. And yeah, and I was like, no, like it's actually easier for me just to see a Markdown file and know what's happening and I can even add tasks to it. So my encouragement to everybody is just start small, start simple. And get good at that and get comfortable at that. And then you can, you know, uh, graduate from there. So.

And, and 30 chime noises later, we are going to have a report about your Yacht Club emails.

That's right.

I mean, speaking of MCPs, are you using MCPs at all in your Cursor experience? How is that fitting into your workflow?

I am. So I'm gonna, um, show you a couple of those now. Um, I wasn't using many at the beginning. And then the first MCP I started using was for Postgres.

Mm-hmm.

Because it's really useful to ask the AI, hey, can you go see if I, if this data is actually in the database? So I started that and then I've gone down the rabbit hole. So I'm gonna show you a couple MCP servers that I think are really useful. So let me go ahead and share my screen. Okay, so what you are seeing now is on the left, I've got BrowserBase. It's the actual backend. I've got a free account, so I just wanna try this out and see how well it works. I'm gonna show you. the fun that you can do with an MCP here. So on the right, I've got Cursor and I'm in my Cursor settings and I'll go to MCP. And you'll see down here, I've got a browser-based MCP.

Yep.

Which I've set up. I've got Stagehand as well, which is really fun. So let me show you how this works. So we're going to go back into— start a new chat. We're now on agent mode. And I'm gonna say, um, navigate to chat PRD. Yeah. And take a screen grab. Now let's see if the MCP gods, uh, cooperate because I did this this morning and it, I, I was like, wow, this, this is super cool. Okay. So what we should see over here in a minute, let me refresh this to see. It did. Oh my God. This is so cool. Okay. So, in the cloud.

Ooh!

So, what I'm doing is controlling a headless browser in the cloud from Cursor.

The future is now.

It's bonkers. Well, it's like, okay. What use is this? Like, that's kind of cool. I mean, let's actually do something kind of fun. So, I'll say navigate. To pricing. Okay. So we should actually see the cursor move over here in this headless browser in the cloud.

You're just showing off at this point.

I, well, I just learned this this morning and, and I was thinking, oh my God, this is so neat. Let's see if it, if it actually works. Yep. There it goes.

Whoa.

So again, well, besides kind of a parlor trick, like what actual use is this? I think it's going to unlock a huge amount of frontend testing for me.

Yeah.

Right. So, as you know, like it's really kludgy right now trying to, uh, to squash bugs on the frontend when you're like taking a screen grab and you're pasting into Cursor and you're like, no, I mean over there. And, and, um, so now we have this, this ability to start automating some of this behavior, you know, right inside Cursor. So that was kind of a fun trick I thought I would Uh, show you. Now, if you're watching this, you're like, what? It really, what we're doing here is, uh, I'll go back to the MCP, uh, part of Cursor. What we're doing is, is basically giving Cursor the ability to interact with other apps, right? And so we're saying, okay, browser-based is pretty cool. You can have this browser in the cloud, you can do things with. I want to be able to tell the AI what to do. I don't want to have to know how to call the APIs and do all that stuff. So. That is, uh, what I thought was a lot of fun.

So. And can you walk us through just a couple of the use cases of the ones we're seeing here? So browser-based lets you basically browse the web and, and do a couple things through, through the text window and cursor. What are some of these other ones that you find useful?

Um, so Postgres is probably the one I use the most. Um, so this, for the startup I'm building, I'm using Postgres on, on, uh, for the database in Vercel. And there's just a lot of times where I just wanna be able to tell the AI, you know, is this value in this row in the database? Like, I don't want to have to actually write SQL to do that.

Yeah.

And so, you can go right into the chat window and just say, hey, you know, use the Postgres tool and tell me if this is in the database or not, which is really cool. Prisma is, I'm using for this Play project, which is fun. Same with SQLite. So, the one I use every day is Postgres.

And one of the things that I love about AI, especially in the sort of dev tools stack, is it just reduces toil. And one of the pieces I feel like is toil for engineers is how many tabs you have to have open to orchestrate working across your task list, right? You have, you have to have your project management software open so you know like what task I'm working on and what's next. You have to have your browser open so you can do some work. You're querying your database and all this puts it in a single interface that you can seamlessly switch through in natural language.

Amen. So I do wanna show you one tiny quick other tool, and I know we're almost outta time.

No, let's do it.

Um, so you, you're probably hearing over and over, uh, everyone's listening or watching me preaching about context. Um, it, it is just so much more important than I think we understand. And again, if we anthropomorphize, it's like, well, how would you expect anybody to do anything? Unless you give them the right book or the right piece of paper, right? And so I've started to use a tool called Repo Prompt. Again, I don't have any financial, uh, uh, reason to say this. I don't own any of this company, but it's this really great tool for Mac. And I just wanna show you how to use it really quick. The question is why, like, why wouldn't I just use Cursor? Well, the, the thing about Cursor is there's all this magic happening in the background with the context where you don't know for sure. what is in the context unless you tag it, right? Which is fine, but they, they sort of magic that away. And sometimes you really, really want to control the context. So what I've done is I've opened Repo Prompts. I've got the, the site on the left and on the right I've got the UI and I've opened up the How I AI project, which is that simple yacht email app. Okay. So say that I want to throw a lot of these into a prompt to do something. So if I select the whole repo, let's go over to Compose down here. You can see how many tokens that is. All right. So that's 395,000 tokens. Okay. That's way, that's way too many. So let's go ahead and reduce that. So, all right. I know I want some stuff from the app folder. All right. Why is it so big? Now we're at, you know, 300 and 24,000, still too big. So I think it's probably been generated. So you get rid of that. Okay, good. Now we're at 12,000 tokens. So the point is, you, if you know what context you want, repo prompt is a really powerful way to do that. So I'm gonna go ahead and select components, lib. Uh, let's open up the schema for Prisma, you know, and scripts. All right. Now what? So I go up here and I put in a prompt. How can I improve the maintainability of this code? And then you can do some other neat things like I want to include a stored prompt and I'm going to use the architect version. Now, what is that? Well, that is a prompt that RepoPrompt has written already with a bunch of kind of power moves in it, right? It's, it should act like a, an architect versus a dev. So now I go down to copy and I'm going to say I want to include the saved prompts. I want to include the files and I want to include the user instructions and I'm going to click copy. Now what? Well, I'll show you. So let's go over to 03. Now I could, I could go over to Cursor, but I don't know exactly what Cursor is going to do to my context. Instead, I'm going to paste it in here. Now, what is this? What you've got, let's start at the bottom. It's basically putting everything in XML tags. Right. So you've got user instructions. So that was the prompt I put in. Then the meta prompt is telling it how to execute the prompt and the files that it's including. Let's go up here. So file contents, this is kind of the key. So each file is included and it's demarked specifically like this. So it says the file with the actual Path. And it's, so it basically, it's very specific. It's saying to the AI, this is exactly the context you need. It's super clear. And then you can execute some sort of prompt on that. I do this for like heavy lifting stuff where I used to do this all the time with O1 Pro, where I would go into Repo Prompt, I would select exactly the right context, and then I would go into O1 Pro and say, think super hard about this. I've given you exactly the right context and you get amazing answers because of that.

Yeah. And these, these new models have such big context windows, but I'm not copying and pasting 12,000 tokens into the chat window.

Right.

But this tool just does it for you. Really interesting.

Yeah.

And then you're getting less of a black box here.

Less of a black box. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, you know, and I have a feeling that this stuff will probably go away. I think, you know, the context windows are gonna get bigger. Tools like Cursor are gonna get better at managing context, you know, but right now you have to do all this stuff. Like you, you can't just wave your wand and, and hope the LLM's gonna write all the right stuff for you.

That, that's what I've been doing. So now I have a, now I have a better process, um, to, to follow here.

Okay.

Anything else really important in your stack you need to tell us about?

Um, the most important thing, um, uh, is this. So let me share my screen. So this is Tiesto's live set from New York City. So this is how I actually code. I just turn on some EDM and, yeah, and late at night, you know, code, uh, after everyone goes to bed listening to amazing EDM. And, uh, that is an important part of my stack.

So if I could ask for an additional cursor feature, it would be AI-generated streaming EDM matched to the generation pace of your tokens that ends with a drop instead of that cursor.

I would pay extra money for that.

You, you heard it here first. Get, get, forget all this task management context window stuff.

Forget about that. I want media.

Let's bring in the fun. Okay, we'll spend 3 minutes on lightning round questions. One, you're a builder, you're a founder. It's clear how this technology is changing the building part of things. How is it in your mind changing the company and the founder side of things?

Wow. It's a complete rewrite. So I've been fortunate to start 3 companies and and see them acquired. And one of them, you know, we had about 110 employees and I had a CTO and a VP of Eng and, you know, product managers and, you know, building this new startup, I literally feel like I'm able to do all of it. Now, am I able to do it as well as a dedicated product manager? No. Am I able to think as deeply as a CTO? No. But I am able for sure to build this company by myself. And I mean, you're doing this with ChatPRT. I mean, it's, it's bonkers to me that it's actually possible. So I, I just can't wait for the future.

I could not agree more. Okay. And then of course you showed us how you're a very thoughtful and organized product manager and manager of your AI, but you know, it sometimes doesn't listen, so. What do you do? What's your, what's your tactic for really getting it back on track?

So I'm just too nice. I, I just say, please think harder about this. Like, I know you can do this. Um, you know, think again about it. And I'm just not a mean person. So as much as I wanna say, you know, goddamn it, you know, I don't.

I, I have a hypothesis that this is, this is actually a parenting thing, cuz I do the same thing. I say, I believe you can do this. I believe in you.

I, I believe you can.

I believe you can. Well, that's amazing. Ryan, where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

Um, I am on X all the time. So x.com/RyanCarson. Um, and if you wanna know a little bit more, just head to ryancarson.com and that is me.

Great. Well, thank you so much.

It's 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 howiaipod.com. See you next time.