Coding an App with a Baby in Arms

Speaker A: Hey, welcome to AI Applied. And it has been a minute. And can I just explain why there may have been a little gap between our last episode? It's because unexpectedly. Well, maybe not totally unexpectedly, Jaden has become a father for before you start getting in with your congratulations the fourth time.

Speaker B: Uh, so, baby, this is nothing new.

Speaker A: Nothing new. Listen, every baby is new. Every baby is our little baby miracle. Clay is the cutest little guy. Jaden is working on very little sleep. Uh, and I also, by the way, simultaneously, like, went up to Canada, uh, with. With my son Finn. We were camping out in the wild. So, like, anyway, the. The sort of stars aligned. I don't know which is the bigger story, me going to Canada or Jaden having a baby. But let me just say.

Speaker B: Legendary. I will say.

Speaker A: Can I didn't realize that. I forgot Jaden was from Canada. So I went up to Banff and, uh, and I just. Jaden and I were just talking off the air and he's like, yeah. I was like, have you been there? He's like, yeah. And I was like, I don't believe it. Because I don't believe anybody who has been to Banff would ever stop talking about it. It is the most. So Finn and I did a camping trip through there. It was the most spectacular thing I've ever seen. You've been there, right?

Speaker B: Incredible. The water seems unearthly blue. Like, it doesn't even seem like it's possible how blue it is. It's pretty crazy.

Speaker A: It's like a mineral thing. It's like. It's like bright, bright, bright turquoise. The mountains are spectacular. If you're a camping kind of person or even, like, like, what we do is, like, van camping. It is the absolute best. Um, so anyway, audience, it is great to be back with you. We're thrilled to be back. Um, I'll also say this, that in honor of Clay, we are doing a special post. Your review now, and we will be happy. Special. I don't know exactly how that would work, but this is, like, Clay's birthday present. So, uh, we are just, like, looking for ways to sort of, like, use Clay's birth to, um, increase our. Increase our sort of, like, number of stars. So. So that's one way you could do it. Listen, you know, we. We actually had one. We. We were about to talk about one thing, but then Jaden and I got on. We hadn't talked in. In a little while. We've been texting, obviously, back and forth, but we're about to talk about something in the news. And all that kind of stuff. And then Jaden starts in with something. So Jaden, I, I really want to call an audible. I hope this is okay with you. I haven't really checked with you, but Jaden was saying this, and Jaden, I, I, I got permission to sort of like, at least say this. So, uh, I know, and I'm speaking out of turn. Um, you know Clay, you know, again, Jaden, and congratulations to him and Jill. Uh, you know, you're, you sort of like, you've been a dad before. Jill's been a mom before. Um, so you know this, but you're saying Clay sort of like. And as you know, I've had kids. I've had kids too. Uh, has a little trouble sleeping. And so you're like. The first thing Jaden says to me, guys, is, yeah, but I was up from like 1 to 4, but guess what? I got a ton of coding done. I'm like, you've got to be out of your mind.

Speaker B: What?

Speaker A: But you're holding the baby. He's like, yeah, I'm holding the baby. I'm like, how did that work? So he starts to tell me. I'm like, hold on, we're gonna, let's start the podcast right now. Jayden, can you just share? Totally sleep deprived with Claude. Code baby in arms. Probably trying to let Jill sleep. Three other youngins. I just want to hear from you.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, so it is actually kind of interesting. And I already know, like, uh, I'm sure there's, like, a ton of criticism of people, like, well, why are you, like, working? You have a new baby. Like, you should just take the time off and whatever. And like, I'm totally all on board for that. Especially when I used to work at a company, I say take the, take, uh, the time off if they'll give it to you. My first company didn't give me, I had to take, I had to take all my vacation days. When I had a baby, I felt like that was a scam.

Speaker A: Scam.

Speaker B: But anyways. But the thing is, with my first children, so we've had a couple of our other kids where they were, they had, like, colic when they're first born. So very cranky. It's just like they have, like, gas and tummy problems for the first little while, so they cry a lot. Clay was like this for the first week. He's better now, so we're super thrilled. He slept the last, like, three nights through, like, eating in there, but no, like, crying and waking up in the middle. So that Was great. But for the first week after he was born, he had to be in the middle of the night, basically rocked and bounced on a yoga ball. So I'm like sitting on a yoga ball, like bouncing him for hours to keep him happy. Basically. If you just kind of sit there, walk, you'll cry. So anyways, what's interesting though is in the past, we had this with one of our other kids. It was the exact same thing, except back then I would usually just be like on my phone scrolling through X for hours and hours and hours at night. And anyways, this time around I'm like, man, surely there's something more productive. And I'm like, okay, maybe I can like read the Bible or do something like that. That's kind of productive. So I have like, some other things that are better than just scrolling through X for four hours from 1 to 4am every night. But one of the things that I was blown away. A huge unlock that I realized you can actually do is you can cloud code or you can use cloud cowork to basically get any projects done. Now, I'm sure I don't. I'm not. This is a news flash to say that your cognitive function is not at its peak performance between the hours of 1:00am and 4:00am um, really not. Not peak performance there. But what's incredible is, I mean, you know, in the daytime I kind of had projects that I was working on. So I know, like, the end goal, I know what we're working towards. I have to have basically both arms on the baby. But what you can do is I could, you know, take my arm off, hit the, um, hit the transcribe button, uh, or the audio speaking button. And I will talk to Claude while I'm sitting there bouncing the baby. And I'm like, hey, like on this app I'm building, uh, you know, this screen looks off, how it connects and does this, blah, blah. I explain what I want to do and, and hit go. And it sits there for like 20 minutes and it just runs. And so for me, it's like kind of the perfect opportunity. Cause I'm reading the logs, I'm reading what it's doing. I really need both of my arms. So like, I can't even hardly type with one hand, but I could click that audio transcribe button. And over the course of that first week, um, and I kind of had been working on projects for a long time before that, which is like this Bible study app. But it had mostly been a website, and I'd kind of worked on the content. So over the last week and even the last couple of days, I've finished the full app. I'm about to push it live to the App Store. But, yeah, in the last week, I was able to, while uh, rocking a baby, create an entire app that will be live on the App Store, bug free. Incredible. Like, I spent a million dollars on this thing, so really big unlocks.

Speaker A: Unbelievable. So, so this is what. This is the part that I love because I think, um, you know, people will hear, like, oh, I talked to Cloud Code and I told her what to do. So let me ask you this. I want to get, like, really granular, and we haven't done this enough. I think I always like to do it anyway. So talk to me. Sort of like, you're on your phone, what are you seeing? And how do you know sort of like, what to say? I think that one of the big challenges for folks is not like, they know that they can sort of like, ask Claude Code to do things, but they're like, well, I don't really know what to build. So you had a. You had a vision. You're like, you're building this Bible app, Bible, uh, study app. So you just sort of like, you know, are you. Are you, like, looking at what's working, what's not on your mobile? And then are you flipping over to Claude or Claude code? And is it Claude code?

Speaker B: Is that.

Speaker A: Do you have the. Is cloud code an app on your phone? Or it can just. It's the usual cloud app. Or talk to us like, like granular. Like, what are you doing?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I'm actually using my laptop. So I have like, the kitchen counter. I'm bouncing my yoga in front of the kitchen counter with my laptop open on there. So when you're building like a. An iOS app, for example, you'll need like an. You need an Apple computer and you have Xcode, which is like, what compiles all of Apple's special Swift code for iOS apps. And it has an a. Ah, phone emulator popping up. So there's like a fake phone on the screen.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I've seen that when you

Speaker B: do something, it pops up the F phone, and that's how you can test, um, what's going on. So, yeah, I would just reach over and hit the audio button on my Mac, which, by the way, this is just the biggest unlock. I'm sure everyone else already knows this and they think I'm super dumb, but I used Whisper Flow for a long time. If any of you have heard of Whisper Flow. Yeah, and it was amazing. But like, I hated how it kind of rate limited me to like how much I could say. And it's like, oh, you're out of your tokens, you want to upgrade. Or like I was like, oh, come on. Because I just, I talk all day long. So what I didn't realize I was talking to my brother about that and he was, he was like, oh, whisper Flow. You mean like just Apple's like native, uh, audio button. And I'm like, what? I guess on MacBooks, if you look at the very top bar, F5 is a microphone button. If you push F5, you can just talk to your MacBook. I didn't realize that. So you don't actually pay for Whisper Flow. Sorry, Whisper Flow, they're not a sponsor of the show anyway, so we should be good saying that. But um, yeah, I once I realized that. So it's really easy. It's a tactile button. There's nothing fancy you have to do. If you, if you've used Claude code or cloud cowork before, you know that it has like a. And even ChatGPT, they have like a audio button you can click and talk to it, but if it's running a command, if it's working on something, that button disappears. So it doesn't actually let you do that. So anyways, to get around this, you just use Apple's built in, uh, microphone button and you're good to go. And you talk to it. And then I would. And then as far as like, if you are interested in building an app, I mean maybe there's, I'm sure there's a million things you're interested in doing, but if you are interested in building an app, it is incredibly simple. Xcode, which is going to be doing it in swift. Tell Claude code that you're going to do that. Use Supabase for your backend. Use GitHub. All you have to do is make a Supabase account, a GitHub account. Download Xcode on your MacBook and Claude code can literally do the rest. You just tell it what you want and it will build it.

Speaker A: But, so, okay, but, but hold on, but let's pause because like you make it sound so simple. But like Xcode, tell us about what

Speaker B: is, what is it like program that compiles iOS apps. So Apple apps and then like Android Studio is the one for Android apps. So in the past what I've done, because my wife and I, when I first graduated, I was like, my first startup was a, was Ah, like a meditation app. Which, by the way, she rebuilt the whole thing from scratch, uh, two weeks before giving birth because she was on the couch and didn't feel like moving very much. Uh, so she did an amazing job there. But, um, in the past, what we've done is there's two programming languages. One's called Flutter and one's called React Native. That's what we used. And it basically, you build one app and it pushes it to iOS and Android, the same app. The problem with that and, and by the way, Claude will kind of steer you in that direction a lot of the times. The problem with that is that neither of them are native. So Apple has its very own special code base called Swift that it's created for iOS apps. And because React Native and Flutter aren't native, there's little glitches where they're not perfect, and there's some bugs that are literally impossible to get rid of. We spent $200,000 on our first app, and by the end of, like, two years, there was, like, this bug where it just wouldn't play the audios all night long. Like, some people wanted their meditations to play all night. It couldn't do it. So we rebuilt the whole thing on Swift and instantly the bug's gone and every bug is gone, and it's, like, perfectly functional. So all I'll say, if you're ever going to build one, build one native for Apple using Xcode and Swift and native for Android using Kotlin and Android Studio.

Speaker A: So what I love about this is that to do.

Speaker B: No, no, no, no.

Speaker A: It's so. It's so helpful because I think that there's a long time where people think like, you know, you can't possibly build an app. And, and the big thing about this, I think, Jaden, is like, even just from hearing, you know, what you're. How you're describing it, right, is that, like, you know, whether you have a lot of time or a little time or anything like that, the single most important thing you can do is actually define what you're trying to do. I think that so often we just get stuck with. At least when I, uh, get to work with a lot of people and what I hear all the time is like, oh, I'm just not sure, like, what to do or what to use it for. Or is it this. And at AI Mindset, we call the mundane ceiling, which is essentially this idea that people sort of like, you know, they've already done the emails, they've already sort of like, used it to brainstorm, like, what's next? What's next? And we realized like, people were being kind of like bound by their own imagination. And actually, you know, I was thinking like, you know, if I was sort of like going to like, build a new kind of class right on AI, very little of it would be AI and like 80% would be how do you, like, ideate? Like, how do you actually sort of like put yourself in the right, the right kind of like flow state where you're like, what am I actually doing? Trying to do, like, what do I actually want to do? Because this is the thing that I find over and over again. Jaden, I think you'd agree, once you sort of actually define what you actually want, then Claude and everything else can do all the rest. It's just that, that sort of like nugget, don't you think?

Speaker B: 100%, yeah. I mean, it's all about the quality of your explanation of what you want. But I also would say don't get stuck in the trap if you haven't done too much with it of, uh, basically thinking it can't do everything. I would say try to get it to do literally everything. And if there's a limitation, you'll find it and you'll figure out, you know, workarounds or what to do. But assume this thing can, like Claude cowork, for example, can control your computer screen, open up your Chrome browser, go to any website that you have logged in already and do anything you tell it to on that website. So assume it can do basically everything you need it to do. Sometimes it struggles with like video editing, for example, but I'm seeing people making specific tools that work with Claude code for video editing. Sometimes it struggles with doing really repetitive tasks, right? Like generate like a thousand images for like, uh, you know, some sort of news website that you have or some, you know, newsletter or something. So you can go use something like AI box, build out tools and connect them to Claude that can help you with those. So there's all sorts of connections that people are creating with mcps, um, into Claude that can help you with basically everything. It's not good at. But assume it can do everything and try to get it to everything because you can save yourself so much time. While we're talking here, I have another laptop on, on, uh, on the side of my desk that I'm just watching it pop up and it is sending messages to people on LinkedIn about a program that I'm running, uh, some friends that I've connected with in the past. And it's. I, you know, had it put together, the list I gave it, what it was going to be saying to every person, and it's just going and running through that. Something I would either have done manually or have paid, like, a virtual assistant to help me with, uh, the outreach and the contact on that. It's doing all of it for me. So it really is, uh, incredible. And it can do basically anything you ask it to. That's.

Speaker A: That's what I found, too. And I'll wrap it on here. But, like, when I, you know, I think I told you a few weeks ago that I built my first agent. I had my little Mac Mini here on my desk. And, um, it's amazing. And even, like, when I was, like, trying to fix this, I was asking Claude, I'm like, hey, how do you do this? And I have two agents. I have, like, Robin, which is my work one, and Henry, which is my home one. I end up using my home one a lot more, actually. But, like. But, you know, even Claude was like, you should ask Henry. I'll bet Henry would know better than I would. And then Henry would be like, yeah. So it's almost like they're, like, working together. I know I've always heard this, like, agents working together, but until you actually start experiencing it, it's bizarre. Just try things. It's just. It's just like that. But you have to define what you want to try. Guys, welcome back to all of us. Uh, congratulations to Jaden, Jill, to the whole, uh, to the whole family. Welcome into the world. Clay. It is amazing to be back. Uh, we're going to get Jaden a little more sleep. I'm guessing I probably woke him up for this podcast, but great to be with you, and, uh, we will see you on the next episode.