I spent $20,000 on Devin in a month. Here’s what I learned | Ryan Carson (solo founder)

If you're out there listening and you are doing engineering, you're doing your work locally, you really need to open your eyes. I think the future is pretty much 100% cloud agents. I went all in so much so I spent $5,000 on Devin and then I went up to $20,000 one month. You know, I think one of my big messages for today is that all of us have to uplevel our ability to manage agents. Like that is our job. How do you effectively manage 10, 20, 100, 500 employees. This is the whole reason that organizations were built as pyramids. Like, humans can't scale and have 1,000 directs.

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

So what I'm doing is figuring out how to manage, you know, throngs of agents. And in Devin, what you're seeing is folders. And you'll notice P0 is the big stuff. These are the The main things I need to move forward as the business, new features. P1, P2. So priority 0, we've got bugs. Let them work. Usually give them a goal. And it's just such a crazy different world we live in now.

Welcome back to How I AI. I have a super special guest, Ryan Carson, one of our earliest How I AI episodes, who is here to show us what has changed in the last 12 months in the age of coding agents. We're going to wax poetic about our favorite little AI intern, Devin, talk about all the ways you're underutilizing your coding agents, and give maybe the most anti-AI episode of How I AI, where we talk about where AI can't solve your problems, how you need to get out in front and actually talk to people, and how pen and paper still have a place in his stack. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code. analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire codebase. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise ready and scale upmarket faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. Ryan Carson, number 1 episode of How I AI from our early, early days is back again. I am so happy to have you here, my friend.

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

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

Oh my God.

We were such babies.

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

Yes, totally. And for those who have not gone in the archives, uh, we did a really, really popular episode about how to manage your agents with like, it was like pre-Skills even. It was like 3-step mark— like you invented Skills from first principles. It was like 3-step markdown file. We were in an IDE, which I haven't opened an IDE in like months. Um, We were in an IDE and we were really, you were very prescriptive and directive of your agents.

You were very handholdy.

And now, you know, I don't know about you, I'll speak for myself. What the agents are doing is none of my business.

No, let them work. Usually give them a goal. And yeah, it's just such a crazy different world we live in now. It's so exciting.

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

Yeah. So, um, I basically had this idea to make divorce better. So I have, uh, 3 amazing sisters. We're like best friends. I have a sibling tattoo that's hard to show. It's right there. You know, we talk every week and then, uh, 2 of them started to go through a pretty gnarly divorce. Um, and my parents got divorced too. So, you know, I was like, divorce, hmm, like no one seems to be talking about divorce and AI. What? Why? Like, and so I just started working on that and was, of course, empowered by Thor's hammer, you know, which is large language models. And, and I started to build it. And this is when we chatted last, you know, I was in cursor, you know, like you said, really handholdy on the agent. And since then, thankfully, it's just blown up. I basically figured out product market fit and everyone who's listening, there's probably a ton of startup founders out there. You know, you're trying to find product market fit, you're pivoting fast, you're, And I did what all founders do, right? You know, launched a version of Untangle, which is the product, thought it was for consumers, went out. Nobody, turns out nobody wants to use AI for divorce. They want lawyers, people, just, I'm just going to say it. And then I basically thought, okay, not PMF. I'm old enough to know, like, not hang on to things, just Pivot. And, uh, I was like, okay, I'm gonna get a meeting with a lawyer and just see what they think of this thing. And she met with this amazing lawyer named Renee Bauer. And I was like, do you love this? Do you hate it? Is this like an enemy? Is it a friend? And she said, I love it. You know, I, I, there's a paralegal shortage. There's this discovery thing we do in divorce is a nightmare. I, I, I love it and I want to pay for it. And I was like, oh, you, how much would you pay? And she said a great number. And, and now we're, we're B2B and we sell to family law firms. Um, And it's just exploding. So I've been trying to hang on to this solo founder, I'm gonna do it all myself thing, and I'm completely overwhelmed.

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

Humans. I'm gonna have to hire humans. And if any of those humans I'm talking to are listening, I love you and I'm excited about working with you. Now, but, but the AI, yeah, it's, you get spoiled hiring AIs. I mean, you know, you give them 45 pieces of feedback an hour. Um, you know, you're, you, anyway, so yeah, gonna hire some humans and grow the Untangle team. Very excited.

But you haven't yet. And so, I mean, the, the, the good, the good part of the story is you were able to get to rapid iteration, Lots of prototypes, product market fit with you and our mutual intern, Mr. Devin.

Mr. Devin.

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

Totally. I like to say I'm in max Q right now. For those of you that are, are, you know, SpaceX fans, it's like the maximum pressure that I need to hire somebody. I'm doing all the work. And so, yeah, what am I actually doing day to day? So I'll walk you through it. I started off, you know, in a more specific agent, like a Cursor, like an AMP. And then I saw cloud happening. I'm like, okay, I'm really limited because I have to be at my machine. And there's a lot of things I need to, you know, quick PRs, like, here's a bug, need to sort it out. Or what about this piece of data? Need to, you know, and I was like, why isn't cloud like, I feel like I should be working on the cloud. And I thought, what about Devin? Like, Devin, you know, they've been doing cloud for like years now. It was kind of crap in the beginning, right? But maybe it's good now. And I tried it and I was like, wow, this, this thing's really good. This is not—

So good.

It's really good. And, you know, and I, I thought, okay, I'm gonna try it. And it was just blown away by how mature the cloud agent was. And if you're out there listening, And, you know, you are doing engineering, you're doing your work locally, you really need to open your eyes. Like, I think the future is pretty much 100%, you know, cloud agents. There's going to be some local dev. But so I started looking at that and was really impressed. So now I went all in, so much so I spent at one point I was like spending $5,000 on Devin and then it went up to $20,000 one month and I'm like, whoa, wait a minute. I have a big Twitter account. I'm going to go talk to the Cognition guys and tell them to give me free credits. And they did. So, so anyway, I, you know, get $20,000 of credits per month in Devin. Great. But the point is, I live in Devin. I live in the cloud, right? So all of my engineering almost— and it's Devin's right here on my screen. I've got probably, you know, 10, probably 10, 15 threads, and I bucket them in folders because I remember one of your shows, you know, it was either you or your guest was saying it's sort of like 4 or 5 concurrent tasks you can actually keep track of. And I agree with that. So what I use is folders.

Is there any way to show it?

I can show it. I'll show you one thing, which is this piece of paper. Perfect.

This is the AI podcast we're doing where we say we're going to hire humans and we're just going to show you pieces of paper we scribble.

Okay. The reason, but there's a, there's a, I'm doing this for a reason. Okay. So the reason why I have folders for threads and the reason why I have a piece of paper is because it, the skill is managing throngs of agents. Like that is what I do now. And to, to keep it straight in your head, you basically have to bucket these things. And so I have, uh, one bucket, um, uh, that I'll, I'll try to show this to you. Let's see how. Let's see how dangerous this is going to become, everybody. Okay. So everybody, this is Devin. This is my real setup that I'm literally working on today. And, you know, I think one of my big messages for today is that all of us have to uplevel our ability to manage agents. Like that is our job, right? And so how do you do that? How do you effectively manage 10, 20, 100, 500 employees, basically? This is the whole reason that organizations were built as pyramids, right? Like, humans can't scale and have 1,000 directs unless you're like Jensen Huang, then you can. But so what I'm doing is figuring out how to manage throngs of agents. And in Devin, what you're seeing is folders. And you'll notice I've got bugs, right?

Mm-hmm.

I've got P0, P1, P2. So it's sort of priority zero. What are the things that I really need to move forward no matter how distracted I get today? And So I'm gonna show you again my piece of paper. Okay. So I have 2 methods for this. Don't laugh. It works. So the way I stay focused is number one, have a P0 folder, but then, you know, I've got a Dell 52 here. I've got 8 screens concurrently open. Right. And so the way I stay focused is by also having this piece of paper, which has weekly priorities on it. Okay, so it's all about weekly, what is important? And I'll, and I'll cast my eye down here at this beautiful UG Monk system I have, which I'm not being paid to say that. It's a fun little to-do system and that just keeps me grounded. Okay, so let's dig into this a little bit. Bugs is like, okay, there's some stuff going on. I want to get it pretty fast. It's not necessarily P0. You know, let's look at a couple of those. You know, that's the one we're looking at here. Investigate red error retries.

Yep.

Right. So Devin's cranking on that. Um, there's a couple other bugs in there. P0 is the big stuff. I'm not going to show you that, but that's just like, these are the, these are the, the main things I need to move forward as the business, new features. Um, usually P1 is like, ah, stuff that's important. Anyway, it goes down. Um, investors, by the way, tip. Oh my God. Like if you're not using an agent to help draft your investor updates and help you keep track of the business, like clearly do that. But here's the key, build a skill to do it. And this is probably obvious to everybody, but another thing I love about Devin is this idea has playbooks and playbooks are sort of, there's this weird mix of skills, playbooks, you know, sort of thing going on. But I've built an investor update skill basically, which does all that. So this is most of where I do work. And then you'll find like, then that means I do a lot of work here. Like I'll be on my phone and this is the other reality is like, unfortunately that means I can work like 21 hours a day now.

And so you do.

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

Yeah. So, I wanna reflect, I'm gonna answer that question in just a second, but I wanna reflect for folks what I'm seeing here, because you and I are different AI managers.

Uh-oh.

And every time you come on, I'm like, no, I'm like, what an organized, what an organized individual. I am so impressed by you. You're like, here's my 3 steps to managing my agents. And I'm like, you don't just like float in the tokens. See what comes out the other side. And you're like, here are my like prioritized triaged folders for Devin. And I'm like, I just Slack Devin like he belongs to me. I just like a SentryLink WTF question, question, fix.

And that works. There's nothing wrong with that.

Yeah, it totally works. We're, we're so different. But I do think, you know, something you said earlier, I want people to hear, which is like the job right now is to figure out how to manage agents. And the reason why, I know both you and I are 27, so of course we're, we're young, we're spring chickens.

I have infinite energy.

The reason why I think folks of a certain level of experience are like ready to cook right now with AI is all those management skills that you have developed over your career can be applied right here.

Right now.

How do you structure? How do you team? How do you prioritize? How do you delegate when you have a team of 500? How do you still stay anchored on like the 3 things that are most important for you to do? Where do you micromanage? Where do you let go? Like all that stuff still—

Pays off.

Yeah. And it pays off. Yep.

I think in multiples. Like, so another practical tip I want to talk about is I have, it's a playbook, but it could be a skill if you're not using Devin. It's called Watchdog.

Mm-hmm.

And, and, you know, we're starting to pick up a lot of family law firms now, and they have a lot of cases, right? And, and I'm literally doing customer success and engineering and sales, right? And so it's like, whoa, how do you keep track of actually what's going on in these cases? You know, where, where are clients hitting UX bugs? Like, where are they? What? Oh my God, how do you keep track of it? So Watchdog, what it does, and I, this is multiple iterations, everybody. So what you want is like, When that moment where you feel like, I need to know what's going on in the business right now, I feel stressed, I don't know what's happening. This is when I run Watchdog. And what it does is it basically, it has a skill for that that's repeated for each firm. So think of these as customers, right? And it goes into each account and says, what's going on with this account? Like, what was the activity since we last did Watchdog? Where are the errors? Where are the Sentry errors? You know, where does all this happen? But then, but then you don't want just data. You want it to be transposed and filtered and sorted for you. So then it comes up with the top 3 things that are going wrong. And then either like, well, wait, have they been fixed? Because we're shipping a lot of PRs. Like I'm shipping probably 40 PRs a day now. So did it get fixed or is it currently being fixed? Or is there an open PR that never got merged, right? And it just gives me all that. And then I talk to that thread about, okay, let's dig in a little bit. And that's how I manage the chaos.

Yeah, I, you know, you asked me how do I manage the decision fatigue? And I feel like I start a business for every child I have. So, like, 3 kids, 3 businesses. I have a lot of decision fatigue. There's a couple things that I do. I approach it very differently, which is I think about bucketing my time.

Mm-hmm.

More than I think about bucketing the tasks, which is like, there's time in the day that I do like very, very specific tasks where I'm copiloting with AI. There's other time where I'm just like, I dedicate to spinning off everything or checking in. So, I have to, as a solo founder, I have to bucket my own time on things. The other thing that I use is I use decision fatigue as a prioritization heuristic, which is functionally, If there is a feature that I'm working on that I let die on the vine, that is my—

That's your symbol.

That's my symbol for maybe this one is not the one I really care or believe in. And so, um, I, I sometimes think that people, you know, don't, don't tell anybody. I know I'm a token maxer and you should let your agents run 24 hours a day and ship as much code as humanly possible and software everywhere. And I really don't ship more than I think the market wants. Like, I really try to like constrain my output capacity, not on quality, not on bugs, but like, because I don't, I don't think I get multiples of quality off of multiples of output.

I totally agree.

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

I agree. I actually think we're nowhere near any frontier model having the intelligence to know what to ship.

I agree.

It's like a million miles.

I mean, I agree.

So, so yeah, I think, you know, I think we all wanted these sort of like automatic improvement loops to, and they just don't work with product. They're kind of a joke.

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

Amen. So I want to double-click on that. I think what, what, what is happening is people are not getting out of their chair enough and actually talking to real people. So, so, you know, the way I figured out PMF for Untangle was, you know, I went out found with an email. I did a Google Meet with a potential customer and I talked to them. Boom. That was step 1. But then step 2 is like, as soon as we landed them as a customer, I was like, can I come to your office? And I just want to sit and I want to talk and I want to— and this is all like obvious product stuff, but I think because we can ship so much and build so much digital product, we're not getting out of our chairs enough.

Um, so people totally agree.

Go talk to humans for real.

Go talk to humans. Yep.

And, and build stuff they need.

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

Yeah.

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

100%. Um, but let's talk about though why probably both of us are still using local agents, uh, for some things. So it's interesting. So right now as well, I have Codex running. Um, and I have, and I have it using Goll. And I find that in particular, like the low latency plus the browser on my machine pairing, like, plus like basically infinite tokens, you know, from, from OpenAI.

Yeah.

Yeah, cool. I'll take the subsidy. Um, that, you know, plus goal really, really is good for when you have this kind of, I've got a feature, it's a lot of front end UI. I just need you to grind for a lot and I need to be here and kind of hold your hand. I find Codex unmatched for that.

Yeah. So if I were to, cause what we said we would do is compare and contrast our solo founder AI startups. So I would say I am personally spending my time in Codex.

Mm-hmm.

When I'm pair programming or, or managing a product, it's, it falls into a couple categories. It's gonna be like large feature initiatives that span frontend and backend that both like, again, need like a lot of code written and you have to grind on it and needs that like intervention every now and then to narrow it to the experience that you want. Um, a lot of like long-running refactors and Hectate stuff. Like, again, I think the latency is unmatched. It's— GOL is really, really effective. Subagents are really, really effective. And then I use Codex a lot for verif— I think it's very good at verification. And so, a combination of GOL plus a CLI tool inside your codebase that can verify core flows, or I use GOL and Browser use to do frontend verification a lot. So I say, write user stories, use Chrome, pull up the preview branch in Chrome, go through it as a user, list which user stories pass, identify bugs, fix them until you're good. Those are kind of what I'm using Codex for. When I'm using background agents, it's a lot of like auto fixes on bugs. Um, one out, like when I'm on calls with, with customers and they say, oh, do you have this MCP? I'm like, I do now. Um, so one-off things and then sort of, um, operations, as you said, like I use a lot of agents for, for operations. And then, you know, I do have a couple like purpose-built agents in the stack. So, I use BugBot a lot for PR review. And then, I just built this thing delightfully called Merge Mommy that, that does risk assessment on my PRs and auto-approves low-risk ones.

So cool.

Um, 'cause I am also shipping a lot of PRs. And so that's—

And is that— tell me about Merge— tell, tell me about Merge Mommy. Like, that's good. And then I'll tell you about my land PR skill. I wanna compare and contrast.

Yeah. So, I did an episode on this a week or two ago. It's an Eve agent, so it's deployed on Vercel. And whenever a PR is opened and then passes all its CI checks, including BugBot, Merge Mommy gets triggered. And then what she looks at is she scores the PR on like 5 aspects of risk.

Cool.

Like how big a blast radius, security, whatever it is. And then if it gets scored as a low, Merge Mommy stamps it with an approval and we can merge without a human approval.

Cool.

But if it's medium or high, then it pings us in Slack and says, it pings either my colleague or I or somebody else in Slack and says, this one's ready for you to review. Because for our SOC 2 compliance and all our controls, we require kind of like alternative review.

Smart.

And it just allows us to like get through A lot.

Okay. First of all, annoyed I missed that episode. That sounds amazing. I'm gonna go watch it. But number 2, interesting. So I have something called Land PR where basically it's a playbook in Devin, but you can think of it as a skill. And it's usually, it's when the agent comes back and says, okay, the PR is done, you know, and then I trigger it. And then what it does is it basically makes sure that number one, it runs a fresh Devin review on the PR, which, and Devin review is like an actual product inside of Devin. Which is another reason why I think people should just pick— I'll sort of rant about that later, but the code factory, like it should have a good built-in review that is a real review product, right? So it triggers a review and then it basically allows up to 2 loops on that, right? You know, okay, all right, find all the bugs, check that all the comments are resolved, and then, and then There'll be some more that come up, do it again, does it twice. And then, then the thing is, is it records a video walkthrough. And this I find Devin is just really good at. Like, so what it does is it records in the browser and it actually kind of narrates over it. It's got captions about what it's doing and it's got this cool little, little test, you know, list of tests it's doing and whether they're red or green. And you get all this out of the box. Like, I tried to build my own code factory and get all this Stuff. And I was like, I don't have time to do this. And so the land PR basically has to show me that video. And then I, then I say video approved, land it, and then it will merge. So that really works for me. It's kind of that, I think this is where CI/CD and DevOps, like now you have to be even better at it, like, and really care about it. And, and we use merge queues in GitHub as well. I'm loving merge queues. So, couple of the nitty-gritty, this is what I'm actually doing stuff.

Have you, okay, you all know, this is how you know, not, not sponsored by Cognition, but you all are welcome. Um, we love you.

Yeah, come on.

Um, I can't get Devin video verification to work. I can occasionally get it to screenshot.

Really?

And like on frontend stuff, it taps my, um, my credits for the session and then just falls over. I don't know if it's probably a problem. It's probably a me problem. All AI things are probably a me problem. But I have not been able, but I actually, I do want to show this for folks that want to know exactly what it looks like because I found an example of it. So I'm claiming that it doesn't work, but then I'm going to make it work. Devin will actually go ahead and test it and record a little video of it using it. And you can see these little captions down here.

Isn't that cool?

It's exposing its reasoning. It's super cool. It's very useful. I can just only get it to work.

Occasionally. So a couple of interesting comments I have on that. Number one, interesting that you're in Slack.

Um, oh, I'm never in Devin UI. Never.

Okay. So interestingly, I'm never in Slack. Um, I am trying to cut Slack completely out of Untangle and, and the way the company is going to exist. Um, and I was laughing because you have so many sidebar, you know, um, notifications and exclamation points and, and we were saying, you know, you're seeing the Devin preview in Slack. And I have a very kind of perfect experience with the video playback testing of Devin, and that's because I use the web app. And so here's what I'm thinking. And again, this is probably going to change, but as we hire people, I'm actually going to require like multi-user interaction to happen through Devin. So we talk in threads about what is going on. That's thing one, because then you're not trying to always figure out where's the context for this thing? Is it in your agent? Is it in Slack? Is it in Google Docs? Where is it? So I'm going to try to do that now. Obviously, that doesn't work for DMs and channels and all that stuff. But I also think, and Jack Dorsey, I think, was saying this, they launched Buzz. It's kind of interesting. I think he banned DMs or somebody banned DMs in their company. Um, and I think, you know, as we scale, I'm going to do the same thing. Like, I don't want any one-on-one chats. Like, if we're having private conversations, I'll call you. Um, so that's why I just think Slack is not built for the AI age.

Well, let me, let me tell you why I love Slack.

Okay.

I like to—

convince me.

I like to personify— first, I like to personify my agents. I like to, as a solo founder, I need my colleagues to be fun.

Fair. I'm just boring and mean.

Um, it's, it's marginally more fun in Slack to use Devin than in the web app, although they're interchangeable, actually. You're just seeing a reflection of the web app. The, the reason why I think I have been so, um, committed to Devin in Slack is actually not because I think it's a better experience. It's that very early on deploying background agents inside companies, Mm-hmm. Um, this is where we're gonna agree to agree. Inside companies, so when I was at LaunchDarkly and we were first deploying background agents, in particular Devin, it was such an effective change agent move to put these background agents in public Slack threads.

Interesting.

And so, like, it was one of the places, actually it was the only place I had experienced up to that point where you could do real-time coding work in public.

Cool.

And I think that changes people's perception of, oh, what is AI capable of doing? How do I work with AI better? Um, and then I do think, you know, in particular, Devin's pretty good at multiplayer, um, chat. It's one of the few ones that like you don't trip over your colleagues when you're both, both chatting in a thread.

In Slack?

But I think it's, yeah, uh, in both, in Slack and in, in, in the web app. And I think, um, It's just, I'm a creature of habit having told everybody to shove their Devin threads in public channels. Um, that, that's why I'm using it. You know, I'm, I do think that chat's not going away because I think that's how humans like to word, like communicate. So it's hard to feel like chat's going away, going away, but I do think more and more people, if they don't want to get rid of Slack, want to get rid of Slack culture, which is like DM culture, private channel culture, like needless, needless conversation culture that doesn't result in anything. Yeah. And so almost like every thread in Slack should result in work.

Yep. But it doesn't. It devolves into just, you know, and I love humans, trust me, but I don't listen, you know, I've I did a stint at Intel where I was an employee, and I learned a lot about being what it's like to be an employee, you know, and I just realized you spend a lot of time talking about stuff that doesn't matter. You're not empowered to do anything. And it's like, you know, what's the point of that? So, and you're, the agent is always going to need the context of whatever you're talking about. So, so have the, have the conversation there. So before we leave, I know you have a hard stop. I do want to talk about the third plane that I have, which, which is a little bit of Claude code. So I, I, yeah, so I mean, number one, it's like, it feels like infinite tokens. Um, but I just can't get around how good Claude Design is. Now, I don't mean in coming up with new design. I think it's bad, but I think for carrying forward, you know, a design system, it does something magical that Codex is hilariously bad at. Devin is terrible at, at design. And so I always have to go back to Claude Design. So am I missing something or do you do something magical design that's working for you?

This is a, this is a great question. I was telling you before this, I'm launching a new business. We've got a new brand, new design. And so I went through this process very recently, so I can tell you what I did. I think Claude Design's Create a Design System is like unmatched right now. It does, it does a great job of decomposing. either an example site or a Figma or something into relative non-slop design tokens you can reuse across, across, um, across a property. Now, that being said, my most recent process is I went to Claude Design. I created the, the kind of like design.md and the design file in, in Claude Design. I downloaded that, gave it to Codex, Mm. and said, Take this plus what's in the Figma and actually build me a technical design system.

Oh.

And it built all the shared components. It made this nice, like, interlinking in our monorepo.

Oh, wow.

Um, and then I, I also tested with Codex using the Figma plugin to then go pull all those design tokens back into Figma into components that I could use.

Um, so once you had the design.md and ported it to Codex, then you were unlocked.

Yeah, that's exactly, exactly what I did. I mean, my problem with Claude, infinite tokens, very intelligent. My blood boils reading Claude output. It like actually raises my blood pressure. It makes me so angry.

So I, the, the one podcast I listened about the, like the, the the opinion on Opus 5 was yours.

Yeah.

Because I love your take and I couldn't agree more. I'm so sick of Opus 5. Like, it's just so frustrating. It's terrifying in one way because it's like, oh my God, it's way worse than we thought.

Yeah.

You know, about everything. And so you're like, okay, you know, which is actually what's wrong here? And I, so it's like super smart, but I really am sick of Opus 5. Yeah.

Yeah. But I do think I, the, the applications in some like very deep spikes, cybersecurity design, like kind of unbeatable on the execution side still in Claude. But I am, I just, the harness experience of Codex is just a lot more effective and enjoyable for me.

It's so good. So last question I had before we go is, we can both answer, you go first. Like, what's your current actual EA? Like, who's your actual sidekick that does all of your agent Work as an executive assistant.

Polly, the OpenClaw.

Interesting. Okay. You're on OpenClaw.

Still live in OpenClaw.

Okay.

Just committed there.

Yeah. I love OpenClaw. I love Pete. I love the team. I love it. I just moved off. Um, I was like, screw it. I'm just going to run Claude code, um, on my Mac mini. Um, and I actually want to switch to Codex because I just love, love, love the UI of Codex. They're so, it's the, it's wonderful, the whole thing.

Yep. Yep. Yeah, no, I use, I still Polly, the OpenClaw is still, still running, but I do now have my emails constantly open in the browser in Codex and Codex functionally runs my email. It, it, it, it ran through 2,000 unread emails in my Gmail the other day and just changed my life.

This is, this has been a game changer. Um, so like you, I've hired a lot of people in my life, like, Hundreds and hundreds of people and let go lots of people and all this kind of stuff. So, um, I, the way I'm running my hiring process right now, I really love it and we'll see if it works out. But, but I think, I think this is interesting. Um, so what I decided to do is I basically on Twitter, I was like, okay, we're hiring our first engineer. You gotta be like super duper duper AI forward, you know, of course. And I don't really care where you live. And all I want you to do is record a video Full screen, everything, your whole desktop of you building a new feature for an app that already exists. And I just want to see the whole thing. And I don't want to talk to you. I don't have a meeting with you. I don't want to get to know if I like you. I just want to see how good of an agent manager you are. And the videos I'm getting are fascinating and very revealing about whether I would want to work with this person. And I'm liking it. So I've got, you know, a number of people that are probably going to move to phase 2, where then what I'm going to do is say, okay, give them access to Devin and actually build a real thing. And then, but record a video of that. And then basically at the end, I'll do some sort of quick, well, we should meet, you know, and chat, and then I'm going to hire them. And then I'm just going to watch their agent output. And that's how I'm going to manage them.

I mean, well, one other thing is if they work with Devin, you get the replay video anyway of how the Devin computer works. So, uh, save you, save Do a stack.

Thank you.

The one meta observation I have on this is you're almost hiring a human like you would hire an agent, which is like, I love you. Like, we'll get along, I'm sure. But like, really, I just want to see how you do this. You're doing a verification loop is what you're doing.

Yeah. And think about how much better this is in this insane way we used to hire.

Yeah.

You'd like, I like this person.

I like you.

And then you're like, we're going to kind of ask you to do some weird technical project. And then, so very excited. to see this shake out.

Okay. Well, um, just to recap for everyone, the, the 2 most AI-pilled people on your timeline spent most of our time talking about how too much AI code doesn't really get you great product.

Amen.

You should just go outside with your human body and talk to customers.

Agreed.

Keep your priority on a piece of paper on your list.

It works.

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

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

And I'll say, if you impress Ryan with your video, you're probably going to be an upcoming guest of How I AI, where you will show us how you use your background agents. Awesome. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for joining.

This has been a blast. Thank you.

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