Ben's Builds: #2
my stack, instructions, tools and skills
Following last week’s builder log, I’m doing it again 😊
This week was pretty unproductive from a building POV as I went back to my hometown, Cardiff, to speak at my old school about business and AI.
To my horror surprise, almost all 16-18 yr olds I spoke to only use ChatGPT and only for school work. I was half expecting some kids to have used it to build something. We have more work to do!
I’ve been muddling around for a while now, at least since our third, Poppy, was born in December. It’s time to get some ‘proper’ work done now.
I’m leaning back into educating non-coders how to build with AI. Shock.
What did I build this week?
Fork Off
Name tbd but I like it 😂.
This will be a course I’ll open up once a quarter to teach non-coders how to build things with AI; apps, automations, agents (oh my!). Why once a quarter? Because everything moves so fast. I can tweak the content without worrying about new folks joining and getting stale content.
It’ll take a few weeks to get the content right but I spun up a custom course platform for this using Droid. You’ll be able to log in, see progress, the usual stuff.
I procrastinate on courses a lot because I don’t think step-by-step tutorials are useful and I need to be able to visualise how it looks, feels and most importantly, does it teach what I am really trying to cover (ie teaching you how to build so you can feel confident outside the course).
Why ‘Fork Off’ - a play on forking projects to remix them for yourself. I’m a simple man.
X Bookmarks Search
I now rely on X bookmarks for nearly all the content I put in our regular emails, plus a bunch of stuff I want to try/use/copy later but it’s impossible to search easily, filter etc.
I just spun up a quick web app that does exactly that. I may make it public. Need to work on the filters!
Email Triage Agent
I have one already. I set it up once to label/archive emails for me but I need to dramatically improve it. So I thought this was a good chance to try out Replit Agent 4.
It was 💩.
I can only hope it was my own skill issue but so many little things just did not work. I had a little running note of all the issues I was running into;
Then I gave up. I’d have finished if I used my usual Droid/Pi tools.
I’ll be back to test this again and do a proper breakdown. And finally get an email agent working?! 🤞
Builds from last week…
Cookbook site I haven’t touched since last week - oops
Become a builder - I published the first cookbook last week and will be folding this into the course
https://gists.sh/bentossell/a4e5e7048e8a355ec56cf3db86169ae2 What’s in my stack - tools, skills, instructions, models
New tools I’m using:
Chops - a light mac app to manage all your skills
Claude Cowork - I ran a poll in the newsletter this week and most of you want me to do a breakdown of Claude Cowork. I’m now using it daily, it’s not my go-to tool (and obviously limited to just claude models) but I think there’s a lot that can be done in this tool. Plus 2 leaks; folders and text it!
Other tools
I hate AI writing, and consider myself a poor writer. I don’t use AI writing much except to get me off the blank landing page problem. I saw these recently which I’m starting to play around with.
Every’s AI style guides - which comes with a prompt for your agent to interview you and nail a style guide…let’s see!
Jack Butcher has a way with words + images. I pointed my agent at this repo to write the copy for forkoff - which I will change but it’s a nice starting point.
Tropes is another tool/set of instructions to avoid AI slop writing too
I think some unique combo of this packaged as a skill is something I should try and figure out properly 😊 to be continued…
If you know a builder that’d find this useful, feel free to forward to them.
Have a great weekend!