The Adam Sand Report - Thursday, July 16, 2026

What's going on? We are going live again tonight. I do these live streams at 9 o'clock on Thursdays for a reason. I fully expect them to not be very good. That's why I do them late at night so that most people won't show up. Um, the whole idea behind these live streams is that I'm going to just do live real building. Um, there's no, uh, reading the model card from the newest release of the latest model. There is no this destroys everything, uh, constant like content here. The whole idea is that I just want to make stuff that people might use, might find helpful, and hopefully connect with other people who are doing the same thing, um, that I am doing. And so if you guys have ideas or advice or things that I could do better, I encourage you.

I'm not—

I don't claim to be the expert. I just claim to be a guy who's going to live build things in front of you and actually work through interesting challenges and hopefully connect and, and learn. So that's what we're doing tonight. So what are we doing? I have been really getting obsessed with a set of skills lately called Matt Pocock Skills. If you guys haven't heard of it, I highly recommend it. And so I will share my screen so you guys know what I'm talking about. And it is right here. This is Matt Pocock Skills. And there you go, put this on. Yep, you got that up there. And so the idea behind this is there's a number of skills that he recommends using to kind of stay, um, kind of like understand where you're at in your development process. And it's been a huge unlock for me, um, because essentially you work through these different phases. Like Grill Me with Docs, amazing skill, right? Um, basically it's a very good question and answer period. Actually, if I, uh, if I share my whole screen I can show you guys what we worked on. And so if I go over here, uh, right here, Codex. So then if I come into this one, yeah, so in Codex— and I, I use Club Code and Codex, um, interchangeably. I have different reasons to like both of them. But like, it just goes through and keeps asking questions. If I scroll up here, it is exactly as it sounds. Grills you with documents. And so that as you're going, it's just basically like asking for— asking you for like how you want things designed. You know, you can say— you can ask your questions back, but the whole idea is that it grills you until you get to a point where you feel very confident and it feels very confident. There's a shared understanding, which is huge, right? But then there's also the, um, two spec, which means you basically, you, when you do, when you finish your Grooveit docs session, there's a really good context as to what you were trying to build. And so then you can say, okay, well, I want to turn this into a spec. I want to actually go build this. So then you write /2spec and give it the handoff from the previous session, and you get this, you get this really well-defined spec. Spec from it. Now in that spec, you will then have a— like, it'll typically be a workload that would survive beyond a single session. So then you use this— his slash, um, use his slash 2 tickets skill, and the 2 tickets skill essentially breaks down. So I'll show you guys this here. —so I'll make that big—so you then use the, the Two Tickets skill, and that breaks your spec out into a number of issues, and you can keep those issues wherever you like. I prefer to use linear, right? And so in your— it basically keeps all of your issues kind of organized, adds new issues, and you can choose to like go through your linear and get it all your project all organized. But the 2 tickets breaks it down into steps and now you just basically go implement one by one. So then you go /implement, you know, issue 1, /implement issue 2, /implement issue 3. And that has been like a total unlock for me. And so again, I am not professing to be like anybody amazing, but I'll tell you, um, it's been something that's been a huge unlock for me. Like, I— like, the worst part is it threw shade on every other one because this day here, I kind of broke my personal record for contributions in a day. And so, you know, like, but then it's what happens is like now even your 10 contribution days are the same color as your 1, which was annoying for me. And so, um, what I— but like all of a sudden, like, my kind of previous record was around like 35. I had a 42. But then once I really started getting into these Mapokok skills, you can see here it went from like 5 31, 29, 69, and then I had some time off and then back to 43. So like my, my good days are better than my best days before. And so that's been the major unlock for me is using these Matt Pocock skills. One thing that I also made myself that I'm pretty happy with is, and I haven't like released this to anybody really yet, and, and who knows if anybody would want it. But something that I have found helpful for me is I made this, um, Decode Effort skill, and it's made from a video that I found online. And that video had, you know, typical like download my guide freebie on the video. It was a video explaining like all the different effort levels of GPT's new models and, you know, kind of walking through the code, uh, on code levels, and, and just kind of talked about how people are like, you know, just showing up and like fable ultra coding everything, right? And spending a fortune on tokens. And believe me, I have, because I, in addition to this profile, I also have, um, you know, so see down here, Claudio, so I have, um, 2 OpenClaws, 2 Hermes agents. And so they're also, you know, occasionally working as well.. And, um, and so between these like 4 agents and then my, myself actually coding and building stuff, occasionally I blow up my token balance. And so what I've found was that it— everything that I can make programmatic, like anything that I can make into something that is just repeatable, like I can just like think of like, where am I in the process? And like, what skill should I be using? The decode effort skill was really helpful for me because then I was able to say, okay, and many times, like, we have a CTO here, and our CTO is an absolute weapon, right? Um, exited founder, super smart guy, right? Amazing person, super nice guy too. And I'm terrified I'm gonna get yelled at when I'm working on what we're working on because, you know, I'm a rookie in comparison to him. And I, uh, I said to him you know, I, I wanted to— you know, I'm like going out, like pushing myself further and further and further, get him to review what it is that I do. And in doing so, um, I— what I'm looking for from him is like validation I'm doing something right. But that meant that in the fear of not doing it right, I would just like go way too far with the, uh, with the coding models. And it was like, okay, well, how do I make it so that I can stay organized. And then what happens is you're reading so much, right? You're absorbing so many instructions and specs and stuff like that, like hard to stay focused. And sometimes you don't even know what it is you're doing, right? And so, but I— but the thing that makes me feel confident is that between the Wayfinder skill and the Grill Me with Docs skill and the 2 spec and the 2 tickets and then the Implement, and there's other ones like Triage, um, and stuff like that and even the Ask Matt skill where you can ask it which skill you should use. And then when I decode the effort and then use the implement in accordance with the effort assigned, I always kind of know where I'm at. I at least know I'm on the right path because I can say, hey, I want to keep going with this. And I, and, and I can, you know, step away from the computer for a few hours, come back, and I know that all I have to do is like remember to go in and say like, where am I at in my process? Like, I can just kind of say, what am I— where are we at, what should I do next? And then it will guide me, right? So like it said, okay, so in Codex I have to use— like it said, I use the Ask Matt skill based on the above context. Which skill should I use on Codex for ADA 453, which was the 453rd issue, right? It says, okay, we use this, and there's also another skill called Domain Modeling. That is what I bring over to Codex to say, all right, well, I'm going to do that one next. Then if I go over to Codex, where did they go? Right here. There you see ADA453 because Codex is where I'm working on the mobile app side and then Cloud Code is my everything place. That's what we're going to pick up. It's like we merged to this PR, PR132, and we're going to say, okay, which one do we do next? You're going to get to watch me do Effectively, you're gonna watch me live work my way through the same way that Matt Pocock instructs you to use the skills. So again, I'm not the genius here. By the way, I see lots of people hopping in. If you're here and like, I don't know you, I don't know who you are, I don't know where— like, who's on, say hello, put something in the chat. I, I— the reason that I don't do this as a webinar or I don't make like YouTube videos— like, we have tons of YouTube videos— but the reason I do these lives is because the audience kind of gets to be a part of it. So I enjoy connecting with you guys and gals out there. So say hello, let me know where you're from, um, let me know what you're working on, let me know what you want to see. If you have a question and I can answer it, I'll do my best. And if I'm doing something absolutely stupid and you think that I should be doing it better, please, Lord, share. Like, if I'm doing something dumb, flame me in the chat. Like, help me out because I love to learn and I love to get better. I have no ego about this. But I feel like I'm starting to figure some stuff out, and that's why I do these live streams. It even holds me accountable and gets me to push deeper into the night. So let's, without further ado, let's get into it. All right, so I merged that PR and it was all green across GrapTile and everything like that. So, uh, what do we do next? Which issue do we tackle? And while that's going, GrapTile, that's another thing That's cool to talk about. Anytime I run a PR, because again, I do not expect myself to be able to review the code and be great at it. If I go to a PR to this one, for example, which— wait a minute, did I merge it? I thought I did, but I didn't, did I? No, I did. Yeah, this is another one. Then if I'm going to do it, there's this tool called GrepTile. Where did I scroll past it? No, right here. This GrepTile, it basically reviews your code for you. It triggers on a PR completion and then it gives you a score of like out of 5. Then you can trigger, like if you're in Cloud Code, you can click this button right here where it says Auto Fix CI and Address Comments. Well, you're used to maybe getting your Vercel issues or your linters or your GitHub Actions of sorts, but this grep tile, it actually gives you a score and says like, hey, you know, based on the score, this is why it's not a 5 out of 5, and it'll continue to cycle through. So I, again, I would rather throw money at ignorance and solve problems. So I let Cloud Code Review it, Vercel does its deployment and review, like the Vercel agent. I like Reptile review it, and that gives me a really good, um, kind of almost like an agent council that reviews the code from several different angles. But, um, what I love about Reptile is it even puts this diagram together showing you like visually how this thing works so that you can see like, okay, this is what it built and this is how it works. And then again, this is like review round 1, and I'll keep going, review round 2, And then another part of my work— again, if you guys are digging this, that's good— but like another part of my workflow that I like to do is what's called independent verification. So I have two skills that I've kind of built out myself that have really helped, is, uh, independent verification, right? So this is one where it basically says, okay, I built this thing in Codex, right? And so then I'll go to this contract completion right? And it'll do this completion contract. So it'll write out a— basically write out this completion contract of like what it did, um, which is up here, right? It'll be a little bit longer in some cases and not in others. But then once it fills up the contract completion, then I can take a little snippet of that, which is usually just like the expected outcome and like what was, what was done and what the expected outcome is of what it was done. And there's a bunch more about like the files that were changed and the reversal criteria and failure state, success state, testing criteria, evaluation criteria. It does all that. Then what happens is then I can go over here and I'll go independent verification and I'll run it against what I asked for, like what that contract completion says so that it will do a review and that's my final before I merge. I like grep tile, doo doo doo doo doo, go 3 out of 5, 4 out of 5, 5 out of 5. All the while Cloud Code is giving it session and Vercel's deployment agent is giving it session. Then once it's, uh, once it's done, I do the independent verification, it's merge ready, right? And then I feel like, okay, even if I don't even necessarily completely understand what it is that I'm building because it just reaches outside of my technical ability, the thing that I have is an immense amount of like domain expertise, tacit knowledge, business primitives. I understand the thing that I want to have. More than any developer would. And so this is how I make up for my shortcomings. And then, you know, thank goodness I have a CTO who's much better than me, who then builds guardrails for me. And so with that, let's go with— we got— okay, so next issue should be ADA 324, stream chat sign up and app provision dependency chain is now this. PDR PR 132 successfully settled. ADA 329 cannot be completed until the authenticated stream users exist. Education work is ADA 327. ADA 327 is blocked by ADA 324. Now if you're wondering what all these ADAs are, this is just what's in Linear. These are all the issues that are in Linear, right? And so there's a number of different projects that are underway, right? And so these are the projects and where they are, and then there's certain initiatives. And then when you get into the views, these are groups of issues. And then there's my team with me and my CTO and another guy And you can see here someone will say like, needs Jose, needs Claudio. That's one of my, one of my open clause, right? But then what happens is we get, um, it kind of, it knows the entry and exit criteria and what would gate one thing or another. So I don't have to keep track of it all in my head, right? And so it says, okay, for 88324, the work should be short verification, confirm the development is confirmed, teams confirmed, So I feel like this is going to be like a kind of like a pre— like a Frontier model high is probably what I'm going to see. So I'm going to go /askmat, which skill should I use to tackle ADA 324? I'm probably going to guess it's going to be a girl with docs because it's doing a bunch of confirmations. So for those of you just hopping in, we are working through essentially a manually hand-rolled loop of, um, the Matt Pocock skills, which the dream, the goal, the ideal is that eventually on this machine over here where the Open Claws and the Hermes are— there's one on a laptop behind me and there's one over here on this machine, um, a Mac Mini— eventually the idea is like if I get enough experience at doing this, I'll be able to build enough little verifier sub-agents that will essentially be able to test the app. And then I'll have like a little like project manager agent that can essentially do these, like, which skill should I do next, ask Matt for skill, and then, um, verify the difficulty with the, with the effort decoder. And then new session, run the session, completion contract, independent verification, um, independent verification from another model. And then merge readiness, all while doing the loop with the grep tile thing. So I think if I get like 3 or 4— well, probably like, it's probably gonna be like 4 to 6 sub-agents— then I can actually take another step back. But I don't want to do that until I'm completely— oh, it's actually an implement. Okay, so this agent ready, so triage is unnecessary. There's not a resolve, so don't need this resolve. Don't need research, don't need wayfinder, so implement is the right skill. There's my prompt. Okay, so I'm gonna go /decodeeffort, uh, what model and reasoning level should I use for ADA 324 based on the above? And so once I do this, then I can go and start my next session. I'll be coming back to this tomorrow. I'm tired. This is my only downfall, learning how to work in GitHub and getting my ass kicked on getting things to the finish line. Yep, GitHub is— it's a, it's a skill, actually. And funny enough, if you download the Matt Pocock skills, you go /teachme or /teach. That's what I would do is I would go into your coding agent, go into your repo and say, teach me how to navigate GitHub in my repo. And it'll teach you, it'll actually like— and it is a very good teacher, like it'll prompt you with questions, it'll quiz you. And it'll kind of focus on the 80/20 principle of like, we got to get you, you know, what is the 20% you need to know to be 80% competent. Okay, so very helpful. All right, so Harness, Codex, Model High, or Difficulty High, Frontier High. Okay, only move to Extra High if the— only if the audit uncovers substantial drift across environments, ambiguous organization ownership, or multi-file Terraform IAM design. Missing access or required approval is a human blocker, not a reason to increase reasoning. Okay, so no subjects you need initially. Okay, so that's— we got our list there. So we can take this over to our new session. Another— and you know, another thing you can do, and you don't have to do this, but you can also do this, you can go hand off this session for future session content. You don't have to do this every time, but I'll do it with you guys here. If you use this, and again, this /handoff, what it's going to do is essentially say, okay, I'm going to go create an— like, I have a notepad, right? So it's kind of saying I have— like, you or I, we have a notepad, right? And I'm going to write a summary of what happened in this session, and I want to put— write down some notes It's on page 14 of this notebook. Then you can go to your next session and say, hey, independent of everything in this repo, you have a notebook and on page 14, there's everything you need to know about the previous session and use that to lead into what we're doing. Given that there was a lot of shared acceptance of decisions, maybe it's useful. So then it's like, it's got my— so it's got my shared, my session handoff, which is this. So I can say, you know, this is my, this is my handoff. So I can go start my new session. Oh, paste that here, come back here, snag this. Come back here. And you always got to come back here and go, okay, contains the handoff or contact, right? Instead of use Soul High. Now because you guys are here, I'll spend some extra dough and go fast so you guys don't have to be busy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. Um, slash wraps and the handoffs are what really gets me set back. What do you mean? And if you see me looking over here, that's because that's where my view of the, uh, of the chat is. So what do you mean by that, Brian? Slash wraps and the handoffs are what really gets me set back. I'm struggling to know what that means. By the way, thank you for being here. Thank you for commenting. Anybody else who likes, subscribes? One thing I thought would be kind of cool to work on in this session was actually when they do this, there's actually an opening video that you can play and a closing video you can play. And I thought, you know, if, uh, I thought maybe I would like, um, put like— I would use Claude and Higgsfield to like generate like what might be kind of a cool opening video. I mean, I don't know what would be cool, but something that would make it— it's a feature. I need to fill the feature. When I wrap and it gets a handoff into the new chat window. And so what— why does that set you back? Is it because you're not doing the handoff? Because you don't even have the handoff concept yet? Oh, by the way, cool story. So in addition to like thinking about the, um, the cool video for opening, since you're here, Brian, I would love your— you let me know. I was like, well, I see a lot of other live streamers have a, um, have a, uh, music playing, and I thought I should have some music playing. So I made a, I made a playlist so I could have music going. So I don't know how it sounds when I go to share, when I share it with music. So you'll have to let me know. So if I go share screen, entire screen, this one, share audio, share. Then if I hit play and maybe turn it down a bit I basically made this like renovations playlist.

I don't know if you guys can hear it, if it's overpowering, or if I keep it like a third of the volume, is it overpowering when I share the audio? So I'll have to let you know. Okay, so literally one word or something gets me thrown off through the whole next section. They're going right and then it's drifted. Ah, yes, yes, yes. So that is where Svelte and tickets really helped me because I was the same way. I spent years just playing around and I was like, well, I can't really make anything because you get some of the way there and then it just starts turning to crap, right? And so I thought, why is this happening?

And when I started using skills, it was just like anything else.

I just didn't have very good project management. And so when I started using fun with that, like I would with anything else, building a HubSpot for a roofer. Um, it like, it changed it up, changed the game for me. And so I might be able to help people.

By the way, anybody who's here, let me know if the music is overpowering.

I don't know how loud it is on your end, but it should be royalty-free. I believe it. Okay, so see you in the next one. Bye! Oh cool, I didn't know that's new. I know it uses the browser, but now for it to just like— I know it's using the browser, but have that little like popup, that's kind of neat. It's using Firecrawl right now with the I swear the bug code is like the model center but the harness is the same. I just love work. I love work. This is— okay, I see a picture.

This is new. By the way, anybody hop in? Let me know in the chat if the music is overpowering because I don't know. I just— it's my first time trying this.

So what I'm using here, what is, uh, essentially there's going to be a Slack-like feature to my app, right? So I, one of my wayfinders, but the proud part of it, he built been around for so long, how hard is it to put Black-like teachers in schools? I said, like, can't be like, can't be that hard. And it actually showed me, and I was like, no, it's really not. We've been building all that infrastructure, and paying for all that infrastructure, um, actually with a school called screenshot and I'm just— I'm so new, I'm just making that up. But it's actually really easy software development kit to get all of that together. So that's what we're doing. That's what we're doing with our app. Basically, you can pull Slack into your tool and it's like really portable. Like, take your Slack post, if you're talking 10,000 monthly active, um, 500 concurrent connections, essentially 500 users.

We're like, I pay more than this for Slack every month in my own company, my own business.

I'm like, you know what I mean? And so it's like, dang, it's like all I gotta do is build it. But so now I'm not doing it to replace Slack, I'm just doing it or you could, um, I think, your tool.

But they even have like an agent skill, right, that you can use to then check up on your app as well.

App installed yet?

Things that don't need it, um, or, you know, Furbies were not live. But very cool.

Okay, so a lot of people come at this and they have unverified up settings without reaching the secret that multi—

And so also just for like awareness, you can also have multiple sessions running. Like we can say, you know, could I do something concurrently? Like sometimes I'll— I didn't want to like get my ass kicked on a live, so I didn't ask. But sometimes I'll say, hey, can I do something currently to this, right? Okay, can I do multi—

is there multiple issues I can do? This gave me a very clear definition that after this issue, the— and also says that there are a couple Indian communities who need to be placed in the hole because they touch certain structures that they don't believe that are—

For those of you just hopping in, we'd love you guys' feedback, comments, what you guys like, what you want to hear about, and even if you guys see a better way to do something, throw it my way.

And so once this is done, then we're going to use the, uh, slash completion contract, and then we'll use it for verification after it goes through its PR reviews with GrubTiles.

So that's kind of what you're sticking around to see, is like, what does that mean?

You know, maybe I'll try this opening video thing. Just put a little—

and I'll be just wrapping up here, but we'll go here. I downloaded this yesterday.

You confirm you still have access to the MCP for HX2.

Ah, you know what, I tend to find that this works better in chat. Easy enough to verify here, but what I find is that even when it shows— okay, so just to have fun and spend some money.

Recently did some exploration as to why I should do what I'm doing, and that led to creating this bounce back for cinematic, and that led to actually recording up a script for a potential video, a concept. What I would like you to do is to go through actually storyboarding that video. You know what? I really want to blow some credits.

I really want to like just do it. I really want to do a UltraCode session, so we're just going to quickly check.

Archivist.

Let's burn some tokens. I want to write a very detailed prompt for generating this video.

I want to have one shot at UltraCode, so I want to walk you through how I would do that. The goal, which is the way—

So we'll do this while we're— while we are, uh, working our Codex sessions.

Hey! So basically it's— whoops. This is all about DevOps. Mainstream CLI profiles, integrated pre-13 development.

Would we be able to get it unblocked if you were able to use the browser and guide me through getting you whatever so that we can get this—

unblock the next issue?

We can likely unblock 88321's credentials or ignore it violating the infrastructure guardrails of EIS.

Yes, I'm live on a webinar, so people can see my screen, but if you're gonna ask me to show something Okay, so let's cut to reflection. Where should the wayfinder people linger. I don't know who you are, where you are from. I don't even know who, who is just sitting in here quietly. I don't want to—

I just wonder who you are that just kind of hang out.

All right, so let's work in. Okay. Oz and Pruvit, also, should we be moving to v3? Since it will probably be v2 before we go live. By the way, if you are here, let me know if the music is too loud or too quiet. Now, how does that work? That's where I can hear it, but then I don't know if it's overpowering for you guys. So that's 50%. 11 countries around 25%. I didn't ask if the music was good, just asked you if you can hear it. Okay.

Okay, create app button is ready.

Confirm, submit. I'll check. Looks like that worked. Looks like I can bring the screen share back up. Okay, okay, so 11 tickets left. It's launching Frontier right now. It's— Alright, let's go burn some paper. Okay, it's not pretty, but I'm ready to go now. So I'm just keeping it off screen for now, in case it's distracting. But here's the process of our table we've already, already done. Adam Sand. Search now. This for a second. Okay, so I also check the app switcher currently. That's only that. Okay, so it's looking for development.

I think I have you on the screen. That is development app right here, but it seems like it doesn't know this dashboard here. Oh, what do we got here?

Maybe I shouldn't touch it. I'll probably kill it here in 8 minutes if none of y'all lurkers want to comment. No, that's— I don't hear any videos. Must have picked somebody who needed a pick. I don't think this completely unblocks the EA agreement. I think it helps us have a bit more wiggle room to work it out.

But after this game and make sure that it has everything needed, especially given all the decisions that we made on the previous issue. Assuming it must have chose to use Marcus. Now what this is using is a tool called Higgs Field.

upload, uncurl, files, show it, these are all the features that exist. I can see that it's going to want to worry about credentials.

Okay, use our character Marcus.

I don't believe it's generated anything yet.

Oh, there we go, it is generating All right, well, nobody's commented, so I'm gonna let you guys go. Thanks for watching. Um, you guys, uh, tune in next week.

I will try and make it a little bit more Um, yeah, see you next month.