[Mike]

Yeah, I'm actually on the YouTube right now. Oh, now. So I'm looking at the YouTube thing, and I just wait for a picture to come on, but it's not.

Whatever. Oh, there we are. Hey, it's Lunch Bites, the Website 101 Podcast YouTube thing.

I shouldn't have been the one to say this.

[Amanda]

You should not have. Take two. I'm going to take over.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Website 101 Podcast. This is our Lunch Bites.

On the first and third Wednesday of every month, we do a YouTube live that we have also recently decided to make podcast episodes that are also going to be available everywhere you listen to your podcast. So if you like the podcast format, please continue to join us there. Subscribe on whatever platform it is that you listen to.

But if you want to come join us live, if you want to influence what we're talking about, or be the first one to know, come and join us on YouTube the first and third Wednesday of every month at 11 30 a.m. Eastern time.

[Mike]

That's how you do it. And sometimes we do video like visual things on these Lunch Bites. So it's probably better to check it out on YouTube, but not always.

[Sean]

If you had a question or a comment about the content, you know, we will answer it live.

[Mike]

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, put us on the spot.

[Amanda]

Yes.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Amanda]

How are you friends?

[Mike]

Yeah. How are you Sean?

[Sean]

Pretty good. I did my second overnight sleep study last night.

[Mike]

Oh, I can't wait. I don't know if you want to get into that now, but I can't wait to hear about it in some form.

[Sean]

It wasn't as there wasn't as much events as there was on the first one.

[Amanda]

So maybe better sleep then.

[Sean]

No, but anyways, that's what I did last night. So how about you guys?

[Mike]

I'm good, busy. And I don't mean busy. And that's good.

You know, there's a whole thing about people saying they're busy. And that's like a sign of success. I'm not saying that.

I just mean, I happen to be very busy.

[Amanda]

And it's, you know, but also, overall, life is good. Yeah, it's good. Good for you.

[Mike]

How about you, Amanda?

[Amanda]

Um, we went away last week. And it was amazing. And I'm having problems getting back into the swing of things.

Now that we're at home.

[Sean]

Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah. The post vacation doldrums can be a little bit hard to get out of.

[Amanda]

Yeah. Well, usually, usually on a vacation by about five day, day five. It's like, Oh, you know, I miss my bed.

I miss my stuff. I'm I miss my routine. I'm happy to get back.

And this is probably the first vacation almost ever where when we were at the airport coming home, and I was like, No, I don't want to go home. I want to stay here, please. Where did you travel?

We went to Mexico. Not in Puerto Vallarta, where all of the cartel political stuff was happening. Much further south in an area called I'm gonna say it wrong.

We're talking with talco with talco.

[Sean]

I will not be able to correct you even if I wanted to.

[Amanda]

Yeah, you know how you know how Mexico kind of goes like this? Yeah, it's at it's at the very bottom part. Oh, cool.

[Mike]

Yeah. I think I was near there one time when I went there on vacation. Sounds familiar.

[Sean]

Yeah. I've only been once and I was at a resort in Cancun. So I believe that's on the northeast coast.

But I'm I can't really remember.

[Amanda]

The very opposite Cancun is well, I guess the east coast. Yeah. But it's on kind of like down here.

It's like at the bottom of the Gulf. Cool. Sounds like you had a great vacation.

It was a really good vacation. Everyone had a good time.

[Mike]

She frozen for you. She's frozen for me.

[Amanda]

Yes, this is a mandate.

[Mike]

You're frozen.

[Amanda]

How about this? Now?

[Mike]

Yeah, you're back. And I will say so since we last released the lunch bites that we did before on the podcast feed, I noticed that these frozen moments, you're not frozen in the audio. Like you can hear you keep it just hears us.

You can hear us saying, Hey, she's frozen, but you're still talking. It's very confusing when you're listening. Yeah, get ready for that.

[Sean]

That's interesting. So I mean, I knew that the recording was done locally and then saved and uploaded locally. So that's the that's the evidence that we have.

[Mike]

Yeah, that's right.

[Sean]

Awesome. So I was just you go, Sean. I was just gonna say we had a couple of topics that we wanted to hit mentioned in our Slack channel, something about SAS products.

And what is a SAS product? And Mike had promised to tell us what it is, because, I mean, I know the word and I, I think I know, but I don't have a real good definition of it myself.

[Mike]

All right, well, I this is just something I was going to bring up. Curious to know if you guys have any thoughts on it. So there was recently a big kind of controversy in the AI world called SASpocalypse, which was SAS software as a service.

So my understanding of a SAS is just any, any kind of thing that you typically subscribe to regularly, that provides you with something like a to do list kind of thing, an app like Todoist or whatever, or, you know, Asana, I don't know, any, any, a lot of software that you get now where you have a monthly subscription, right? They provide this service as software on a regular basis.

[Amanda]

Does it have to be a subscription? Or is it just something that you log in?

[Mike]

I guess it doesn't have to be a subscription. But it's, I guess, for me, the point is it's some someone else has it on their servers, they build it, they do it, and you're using their service, you know, it's not something you build, it's not something you buy and install. Okay.

[Sean]

You know, I could be wrong.

[Mike]

I don't know what the technical definition is.

[Sean]

Yeah. I think a lot of SAS products have a free tier with limited features or, you know, things like that. So it doesn't always require a subscription, but the goal is to get you in that funnel so they can upsell you into a higher level tier.

And some, some of these SASs, they, they don't even have a free tier, they'll have a short trial. And then you have to, and then you have to start paying for their, their base level plan.

[Mike]

And actually, you touched on something that this is the thing I want to talk about, because this SASpocalypse thing was this claim that in the world of AI, where people can make their own software with Claude code or something, the vibe coding and all that stuff. The, the claim was, do we have any need for SAS products anymore? Is that industry dying because I don't need to pay for your product?

I can just have my AI build my version of it. That's tailored to my needs. That was a controversy.

So first of all, I have more to say, but maybe I'll let you jump in. If you have any comments on that particular, have you heard of that? What are your thoughts on that?

Anybody?

[Amanda]

I haven't heard. Amanda, start with you. Thank you.

Thank you, Mike. I haven't heard anything specifically about that, but just with everything that you've described, my initial gut reaction is I don't want to make my own. Like I want to, I don't have the time.

I don't have the energy. I don't have, I'm definitely not going to compete with some software that's been out there for years and years already. That's gone through a feature upgrades and support and, you know, proper documentation and actually like thought through the full, even business process, even if it's something like not business related, like just a to-do app or something, but has thought out the whole entire process from start to end and like figured out all these weird edge cases and stuff like that.

I'm not going to sit down and make my own. That's ridiculous.

[Sean]

Yeah. I was going to say something similar to Amanda myself. I don't think that it's the end of the service.

Who has the time to vibe code this stuff? Oh, Rob does. Mutual friend.

He does this kind of stuff all the time. It's like a hobby for him. And that's great.

[Amanda]

But I bet he still has software and websites and other things that he subscribes to, that he uses. Like he's, even if he's interested in doing that, he's not doing it for everything.

[Sean]

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I pay for SASSes because it saves me time and effort. And me vibe coding or half vibe coding my own SASS is not going to save me time or effort.

It's going to cost me a lot of time and effort as I try and finagle everything and understand things and deal with all the mistakes that AI is doing, whether it's bloating it or doing it the long way. It's just not worth it. Even if your money is really, really tight, a lot of these software as a services will actually be worth it for you rather than spending the time.

And then what happens when an API changes and you lost all your stuff and now you got to spend another like two weeks trying to get it to work again? No, thank you.

[Mike]

Well, here's a, just before I go on, there's a quick story. This is not necessarily SASS, I guess. It's just a piece of software.

But this weekend I went to a pub because some friends of mine were performing. One's a guitarist and well, they're both guitarists. And the one of them plays pedal steel guitar.

Do you guys know what a pedal steel guitar is? No. All right.

Well, you've seen it before. You've heard it. It's typically in like country music.

It's, it's a guitar like object that lays down in front of you and you sit down at it and you slide a thing around. It kind of goes like that kind of sound.

[Sean]

It sounds like a zither or something.

[Mike]

Well, it's, I don't know. It's hard to describe. You don't see it.

It's got these rods that you hit with your knees and it's got a pedal that you use and stuff. Very complicated instrument. I was talking to him after and he said to tune a pedal steel guitar.

It's very difficult because you have to something like figure out the key of the song you're about to play in and then tune it to that key sort of thing. Something to that effect. I'm not a guitarist, so I don't really know.

Anyway, he showed me on his phone in the break, he vibe coded this app and put it on his phone where you can just pick the key of the song you're playing and it shows you the strings on your pedal steel and it shows you what to tune them to. And it has like this cool little graphic. It looks like every bit as professional as something you would download from the app store.

In fact, he's thinking of trying to monetize it a little bit with other lap steel or pedal steel players that he knows. So that's just a cool example of some of the things that people are doing with whatever Claude code and everything else.

[Sean]

Sure. And actually, that example is something that I think would be worth it rather than paying somebody 10 bucks a month for this thing. It doesn't sound like a kind of thing that's going to break on you once it's working because it's not relying on APIs or other things that can change at the whim of some other service.

[Amanda]

It's so funny that you just said that. And I mean, a niche topic. Yes, that's cool that he did that.

But I love that, Mike, you were like, oh, he's going to monetize it. And Sean is like, that's not worth $10 a month.

[Mike]

I didn't even think about that. That's so true. Well, so you mentioned that you don't have to do this.

You wouldn't have to pay $10 a month and someone might monetize it or whatever. I gave him the example of I sometimes fool around with a regular guitar and I do have a tuning app that I use to tune my guitar. But I just use a free version and I have to sit through like two minutes of ads before I can start tuning the guitar.

That's how it works. So I thought about maybe I should code my own and then I don't have to do that ad thing. I just use it for myself, which I may yet do.

I don't know. But there's an example of that. But here's my question about the SaaS thing.

This is what I was going to get to. Everyone's talking about is SaaS dead, all these service providers providing whatever. In the age of AI, I don't know why all of the apps that I subscribe to that I pay for are not being flooded with new features all of the time because the people who make them also have access to AI.

Here's an example. There's a piece of software that I used. I don't know if I should give it.

I'll give the name, whatever. It's called Milanote. Actually, Amanda, I mentioned it on the show before because you told me about this.

I know you don't use it, but I think someone in your school where you teach Milanote, M-I-L. It's basically a whiteboard, mood board type app where you drag pictures around and stuff. It's cool.

I started using it. I've used it for a couple of years, but I just canceled my account because they have not updated that package in probably years. They've not added anything new to the service.

I realized that bothers me. They do have a roadmap of feature requests, which a lot of these services do, where people are like, I want you to add this and this. I think I've submitted some ideas.

I don't know why they don't point Cloud Code at it and say, hey, implement the top five of these ideas and let's ship them right now. Why isn't that happening?

[Sean]

That's an interesting idea. I'm sure there's some reason behind it, but I don't know the answer.

[Amanda]

It just occurred to me. I think it's a slippery slope though, with all of the issues that we've heard and all of the anecdotal stories about vibe coding screwing up and security holes and leaking data and deleting hard drives. I think that once you say, oh, well, we're going to do it just now to get the first five features to release them immediately, I think that if you start going down that path, it's going to be really hard to pull the reins to slow down that path and having proper code review and going over the merge requests and making sure that the functionality actually fits the direction that you originally envisioned taking the software. I think that once somebody opens the floodgates, it would be so easy to just be like, it's flooding now. I can see why a lot of people maybe wouldn't want, because we all have a little like, oh, it's my baby, it's my software.

I can see how a lot of people wouldn't want potential garbage to be introduced.

[Mike]

I'm exaggerating when I say just flood it with all the new features. I don't mean that. I guess what I mean is still do your diligence and your protocols for testing and so on, but surely they could implement ideas much faster now that AI exists.

They could use it as a tool to help them do what they do the same way we all do.

[Sean]

Yeah, to different extents. It's not like you're required to have AI code the whole thing. I think that one way you could do it is like, hey, I need feature ABC.

It needs to do this and this. Reference this section of the code and make sure that it follows these standards. Spits it out.

Then I go in and look at the code and say, oh, okay, I like this, or please add comments here. Explain why this is doing it this way. I'm not, I don't understand this part.

Go in and learn what AI did to your code rather than check, test it on the front end and, oh, working, commit. There are levels to vibe coding, right? So you could be a vibe coder who has done zero code in your entire life and you're just going to go like, yep, that's what I want and maybe that works.

Then there'll be somebody like me. I'm going to take a look at it as long as I'm familiar with that part of the code. If it's a little beyond my skill, I might ask for some instruction or better notes or comments.

But if I was being asked to do something completely out of my wheelhouse, I might revert back to person one. I just feel like there's different ways to do this.

[Mike]

Yeah. Well, I have been experimenting this weekend with Cloud Code. I finally downloaded and installed the thing because I keep hearing so much about it.

But here's a bit of an annoying experience I have with Cloud Code in particular. Every time I look up, what can I do with Cloud Code? It's always, it can organize your emails.

It can organize your screenshots on your desktop. It can organize the events in your calendar. I don't fucking need help organizing my life.

I'm very organized. I don't need all that. I don't have a million emails.

I have four emails on my inbox right now. I don't have a million screens. So I can never get a practical idea that doesn't involve not being a digital slob that needs to have his life cleaned up.

[Amanda]

Yeah. Plus I am not ready to give any AI service access to my email. No.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Amanda]

Hey, please do something on my hard drive and move these files around. No. No.

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Sean]

Yeah. Unfortunately, if you're using Gmail, they already have an AI that's accessing your inbox.

[Amanda]

Yeah, I know. But it's not some- They do. But it's not some third party that- Right.

[Sean]

I sold my soul to Google.

[Amanda]

Yeah. The Gemini thing is just sort of working quietly in the background. And every once in a turn this feature on and I'm just like, no, just fuck it.

I'm happy with how that's working.

[Sean]

I am exactly with Amanda. I have not enabled any sort of AI on my Google account. I don't need it.

If I need something, I'll go to Claude or I'll hit up chat GPT and ask for help in that way. You know what I want AI? I want an AI robot to come in and organize my house, specifically my home office.

You guys can't see it because I'm really tight up against the wall here, but it's a disaster in this office. I want AI just to send me a little rosy robot, like from our last episode that we talked about, come in and clean my house for me, or at least my office.

[Mike]

Well, it's funny that I heard the creator of Claude Code interviewed on a podcast the other day. I forget his name, but he was talking about whatever, all the stuff it can do. And the host said to him, I think it was Claude Cowork, which is the sort of a more user-friendly version of Claude Code that doesn't have the terminal.

The host said he uses that and he said, give me something useful I can use it for or whatever. And his answer was, you can tell it to read the first three emails in your inbox and compose responses. And I thought, really?

That's the best? Because if I did that, first of all, I'm not sure I wanted to do that like you guys, because it's almost guaranteed to write in my voice, and I will have to double check everything. That's why I don't use Gmail's Gemini now to compose responses, because I have to redo it all sort of thing.

[Sean]

Speaking of using your voice, two things. I have a friend who's writing a blog and he sends his blog articles to me and he's like, what do you think about this? And I tell him what I think, but I can tell that he's writing it mostly with AI.

I asked him and he denied it. But when you read enough, you can tell what is AI. Because the most common thing, and I'm not going to talk about the em dash, the really common thing is flowery words, A, B, and C.

And there's couple other tells. If you're doing that, you got to go in and customize it after. This morning, I posted in our Slack and I said, oh, look, I got this potential client, and here's what they asked for.

And then I went into chat GPT. I did not give them access to my email. I copied the email text out and I copied the text from the file that they sent me and I asked for some suggestions.

And it gave this long, flowery, wordy, high-level prose response, which is not me. Even though I said, you know, I want more casual, but I cut and paste pieces out of it, made my own, submitted it back and said, hey, what do you think about this? I did that twice before I sent it off to the client.

I didn't take everything and I made sure to read it carefully and remove things that to me make it sound like it's AI and put it back into my voice and address my concerns.

[Mike]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's amazing. Like, I agree that I feel like I can recognize AI a lot of the time. I guess it's probably not true, but I feel like there are sort of like giveaways and it's amazing how often people just ask Chachapiti something, it gives them the answer, they copy, they paste, like it's clear that that's not written by them.

[Sean]

Just a little massage. Oh, I'm guilty of this with the last Lunch Bites episode that I put on the podcast. The summary is AI generated.

[Mike]

I think I noticed that too.

[Sean]

Yeah, I just like, and then afterwards I was looking and going, you know what, I'm just not going to let it go this time. And next time I'll do something a little bit more custom, but if you read it, you can really tell. Slippery slope.

Oh, and I've been going into our back catalog and doing AI transcripts, but I'm limited to like one a day just with the service that I'm using, one free one. Again, a SaaS, but I didn't want to pay for the full level. Yeah.

[Mike]

Maybe you should make vibe code your own version. Speaking of the words that it uses a lot, I got, this is a different situation, I guess, but in that Suno, the music app, I was toying around with that one time. I was getting to write a song.

It used the words fleeting, the word fleeting twice in the same song. Wow. Not really relating to the same thing, like just two different sentences in the song.

[Amanda]

Yeah.

[Mike]

Fleeting. And I was just like, this is fucking sick. Nobody sings like this.

[Sean]

Yeah. Some people do. I heard that.

I've used that word in the last week. Yeah, but twice. You have?

Yeah. I can't remember what. Fleeting, like a brief period of time.

F-L-E-E-T-I-N-G. Yeah, I've used it. Yeah.

[Mike]

In the last week, really? Yeah. To me, that's a very unusual, it's like delve.

That's the other one that AI uses a lot. Delve. We're going to delve into whatever.

Nobody fucking talks like that, except Sean, apparently.

[Sean]

Well, I've used it, not in the last week, but I know I've used delve. My kids give me a hard time about using high level vocabulary with them, but it's like, I'm educated. I'm not going to dumb down my language further.

And they're like, how do you know these words? I read books, and they don't like to read as the younger generation. And so, sometimes I intentionally use difficult words in front of them, just to make life difficult for them.

But other times, it comes out naturally. I don't know, but I feel like I have a high level of vocabulary. Why would I use a simple word, when the correct word?

[Amanda]

I was waiting for you to say verbose. Verbose would have been much more efficient than saying high level, Sean. Yeah, but verbose doesn't necessarily mean high level.

[Sean]

Now I'm being pedantic. I know, shut up.

[Mike]

You're exactly the person that AI is being trained on, to get words like delve, and em dashes, and all these fucking things.

[Sean]

Yeah, I used to love the em dash. I no longer use it, because I don't want people telling me that it's AI generated. So I stopped using it, because that became one of their more well known tells.

[Amanda]

I wouldn't even know how to get an em dash on a keyboard.

[Mike]

Yeah, I think a lot of people wouldn't know that.

[Sean]

I used to know a keyboard shortcut for it, but I don't anymore. And if I wanted it again, I would just Google it, or ask AI.

[Amanda]

Well, yeah, no, of course. Em dash, copy and paste. But I think that's the thing.

If you have to start putting in Unicode to get unique characters, I think that's probably a bit of a giveaway. I know the HTML entity for it.

[Mike]

It's not the em dash in particular. It's overuse of the em dash that is the tell. Well, that is correct.

[Sean]

But now everybody knows that one. So even using an em dash, people are just like, oh, this is AI generated. You didn't write it yourself.

I just don't want to deal with that. So when I do get AI stuff, I remove it if there's an em dash in there. I'll just replace it with a colon, which is usually what you can put in there.

[Amanda]

Real people don't use colons when they're writing.

[Sean]

Sorry. I'm not real people.

[Mike]

All right. Anyone else have something? Oh, geez, it's 5 to 12.

I guess we're wrapping up soon. Did you want to talk about something else before we go, or? I think that's it.

Yeah?

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Amanda]

I got no time. I got to leave the house in 30 minutes.

[Sean]

Oh, that's right. You've got to go teach, right?

[Amanda]

Yeah. OK.

[Sean]

All right.

[Mike]

Let's wrap it up. Awesome. Let's wrap it up.

And thank you, everyone, for listening or watching. Like Amanda said, you can tune in to these on YouTube, or you can just pay attention in your feed, and they're going to show up everywhere. So I think the whole podcast now, we're going to try to release it on YouTube regularly as well, right?

Like even actual episodes that are not LaunchBytes.

[Amanda]

Is that the plan? That is the plan.

[Sean]

Yeah, so stay tuned for that stuff. All right, everybody. Thanks for coming.

Bye. Bye. Thank you.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.