🐝 The Sting
Learn AI in public. Embrace the ridicule. Ship daily. Share experience and results. Measure.
Things built: 14 People watching: 7 Cashflow:-$45
🤖 🧠 Learning
Teaching myself to teach AI to teach me how to build an SEO optimized directory with AI. Day eighteen.
All right. Spent some time this weekend improving the backend of my site after fixing all the issues with the scraper. Filtering, bulk select and bulk action now all work.
I noticed that the AI was hard coding my town into a lot of the functionality. I forced to make everything more generic, as I think of reusing it for other locations.
I will have to remember the same when I wrap up the documentation of this project which is currently very specific to the way I’ve chosen to implement it, including the keys to the APIs, Github, etc.
Which sort of answers the question I have been debating these last couple of weeks: why do I need any kind of technical understanding of what the AI is constructing if I can just review the results? Why go through the time suck of familiarizing myself the way code looks and is edited if I could just leave it up to the machines?
And the answer is that without it, I would have no agency, no taste. I would bake in limitations into what the AI is building while blissfully unaware of its existence.
The more I work with AI, the more I realize that as capable as it is, it is still, fundamentally a tool that needs to be directed and verified. More than anything, I am becoming convinced that getting good at all AI requires first getting good at one specific model. Much like learning to play music. If you try to play 5 instruments from the start, you're going to be very mid. If you get good at one, learning the other 4 becomes increasingly straightforward.
🍯 🦡 Building
What did I ship today?
A much improved backend that makes scraping businesses, enhancing them and then approving them a straightforward endeavor.
🤑 Selling
Here you’ll find either things I’ve made with AI or affiliate links to tools I’m using.
Whispr Flow - smart speech to text - you and I both get a free month when you sign up.
Beehiiv - used to make this - you get a free month and 20% off for three months, I get a nice little kickback
Netlify - free web hosting for your projects - No kickback for me on this one
Emergent - vibe coding platform - you get extra credits and so do I when you sign up
Last Word.
Building infrastructure often isn’t sexy unless you have to redo the whole thing because you were phoning it in the first time around.!
Till next time,