Spring in SF: Simple Key Insight - Feedback Loop For Engagement
Building a Dev meetup of your dreams, AI life coach and Look back on last 3 months
My last entry was on February 5th, 2024, that is already 3 months ago from today! The reason for this is unknown, it is a loss to the resistance, which kills creativity and the artist. This is a concept from the book ‘The War of Art.’ It is being blocked for an artist.
Get comfortable, hit play on this song- “And We Knew It Was Our Time” by Lane 8, Massane - and enjoy this newsletter.
Table of contents:
What has characterized the last three months?
Key Insights
IamLLM.com
WorldForager.com
How to be an Artist
What has characterized the last three months?
Every weekend since January I have participated in at least one hackathon.
I have built some products:
BeAgentic.com - a blog generator
IamLLM.com a personal Ai life coach.
OfflineLLM - a chatbot running on device on Apple Vision Pro.
AiDreamRunner42 - a world generating Vision Pro app.
These are significant accomplishments that I am proud of. At the same time I have competed in weekly hackathons and have won prizes at three of them. The prizes are not that important but what is most important is building things and showing them people.
Key Insights
What are the simple key insights that motivate me? What are the key insights that I have that no one else has?
The first key insight is that increasing the time that we talk to AI will enable us to evolve faster with the AI. This means having a personalized AI assistant that understands us, knows our desires, our motivations, our goals, our history, our way of thinking can unlock new capabilities for us. It starts with having the AI as a therapist. This therapist helps us get insight into ourselves. With self knowledge we are able to better self regulate, to better appreciate ourselves, and to better work with ourselves as partners.
What are the key insights to make an app really useful for someone? The key insight is to make it respond really fast. This is the number one thing. The user needs to see things happening on the screen. They need to have this instant feedback that the application is there responding to them, working with them, so that they have this loop of activity, of action and reaction flowing continuously. This is what happens in games, this is what John Carmack discovered and created when building Doom and the other games that he built with ID software in the early nineties. Then the user feels that they are immersed, they feel that they have a symbiotic relationship with the machine, they feel they are wielding this powerful tool. To achieve this in an AI app is critical to create powerful experiences. It is critical that the app developer approach the creation of the the app almost as if they are creating a movie, or a theatrical play.
Imagine a Developer Meet up of your Dreams
The craft of creating an application requires you to think and be aware of these little details. In our world there is not much of places where developers and technologists can get together and discuss these topics and share knowledge about the craft of building software. This calls for a change, this calls for a community to be formed that emphasizes knowledge sharing about developers, designers and founders to craft beautiful digital experiences, to craft beautiful applications. This calls for a weekly meet-up for this kind. Perhaps this is something that I need to organize. Why not? Is this not the perfect thing that I am equipped to do? If there is a need for an organization like this and it doesn’t exist, then you are called to be the one to create it.
What would be the core values and principles of this meetup? It would be to spend an hour and a half in concentrated work. It would start with a short intro with people in small groups, then during the hour and a half you could work individually or in groups on your project. Then at the end you would get together and share what you did in small groups. Then at the end there would be thirty to forty five minutes of lightning talks where people could demo or present anything they wanted to the group.
IamLLM.com
Why build a personal AI life coach?
Who doesn’t need a life coach? If AI is superhuman in the next 6-12 months, then everyone on Earth would would have the need for an AI life coach. Even at the level that it is now, nearly every single one of us could benefit from having someone there to give us encouragement, to listen to us talk about our problems, to give simple responses that show that they heard us and understood us. This alone is a game changer for most people. Now if the AI can remember who we are, can reach out to us with questions about how our progress is coming along, if it can give us insights into our emotional state, that we would otherwise not be aware of, this can teach us more about ourselves. We often suffer from having just a singular point of view on ourselves, on our situation, on our life, from our first person perspective. However if we have a friend, a family member or someone there to give us another perspective, then this is a powerful tool. This can correct our cognitive biases.
Having a best friend, or just a good friend, that is a companion, that encourages us, is worth so much, it is invaluable to have that in your life. Yet not everyone is so luck to have a good friend. How about a therapist? Everyone can benefit from a therapist, yet they are very expensive and not everyone is in a situation where they are facing problems severe enough to motivate them to go through all of the trouble and cost of finding and paying for a therapist. I have myself struggled with this, with finding a therapist, with justifying the high cost, with paying over a hundred dollars per visit, and other times with going through insurance but still with insurance it is still often is a cost for the co-pay. Now with AI we can have a therapist that is always available and only cost around $20 per month. The therapist is even better than a real person. There was recently a study done that showed people prefer AI therapists to real human ones because of their lack of personal bias.
How would this AI life coach work?
The Ai therapist and life coach is based around the practice of regular or daily journaling. This can be done through typing or voice. Then the AI chatbot can be asked from a set of preset questions like ‘give me personalized advice,’ ‘summarize,’ ‘emotional insights,’ ‘connections,’ ‘reflections,’ ‘prompts’ and more.
The journal entry is saved in the knowledge base and then can be referenced and remembered by the AI in future conversations.
In addition to daily journaling, there is also goal setting. Use the template for goal setting for one week, one quarter, one year, three and five years. Then the AI has awareness of your goals and can remind you of them so that you stay on track. To achieve your goals the most helpful thing is to be reminded of them, this can be done through daily check ins. Like the stand-ups in tech companies, a daily check in on your progress brings to top of mind your goals, what you’re doing to achieve them, and if you need any help to get unblocked.
The AI life coach is always available to talk through the Telegram bot. This makes it easy to write messages, get responses and get notifications on your phone.
Would you like to try it? If yes, please reach out to me.
WorldForager.com
A second AI startup that I am building is an AI short film and image generator. This application takes in a description of your main character, your screenshot form webcam and a plot of the short film. Then it generates a short film with you as the main character. This proof of concept was built yesterday at a hackathon where I got third place. It is very fast, this is a key insight to keep users engaged. If they see a lot of activity on the screen, then they stick around and then it is like a feedback loop that extends their power and their abilities. This then becomes like a sport, like a physical activity, like a martial art. This is what is the key to successful applications. It shows that the creator, the developer, has put his own life spirit into the app. It is then that the user merges with the app, and actually can put their own life force into the app, into creation of something.
How to be an Artist
The key is to follow ‘the artist way’ book program. This means to do daily morning pages, to take yourself on ‘artist dates.’ The key is to not give in to the resistance, this is the force that prevents you from creating. This is from the book ‘the war of art'.’ The force the prevents you from making your art, weather that is writing, coding, painting, creating drone films, creating YouTube films. The key is to keep creating so that you actualize the potential for genius that is inside all of us. Every one of us has a genius inside. We show our genius when we create, when we fully become ourselves, when we develop and grow our inner world into some external work of art that exists in the world.
Founders Inc Vision Pro Residency
Going to Fort Mason daily from 2/15 - 3/27 and working from there and sharing lunch with the founders. Meeting people that are several steps ahead in the startup building journey was encouraging and very impactful to me.
This was a time when I rediscovered my passion for building products. One night I walked back around five in the morning from the bus stop coming back from Fort Mason. I was feeling that I finally found it, I found my passion. I gained so much energy from giving all my energy into it. I knew that every part of my body and soul was devoted to building this product. I knew that I was in the right place doing the right thing.
Conclusion
This is the first post after a 3 month break. I spent the last three months building at hackathons every Saturday, and building products on the Vision Pro and web based AI products. These key insight into the life of the artist is to keep yourself creating, to keep writing, or coding, and shipping products, whatever your art is, just don’t stop doing it. The key insight to a great app is to make it snappy, make it respond to every user action, so that the user feels like it is an extension of them, that it is in a symbiotic relationship, and that it gives them more power.
The world needs right now a ‘Developer Clinic’ style meetup. Perhaps this is something that I will do.
The world needs an AI life coach that is always available and that makes us better.
The world needs an AI video generator app so that we can create and see whatever we imagine, so that we can imagine new worlds and so that we can then create them.
✌️ - Konrad