1045: Who can actually max out 5 AI subscriptions?

Scott Tolinski (0:00)

It's crazy to me to hear people be like, I got five different subscriptions, and I maxed them all out. That feels performative to me. I mean, I could understand maxing out one, or even two, honestly, but maxing out more than that, it feels crazy. Like, what are you doing?

Wes Bos (0:11)

Yeah, people have like 20 I see this all the time on Twitter, but I have 20 different subs, and I've maxed them all out. What are you building?

Scott Tolinski (0:19)

It's cheaper than not paying for an employee. It's like, well, okay, but what do you need?

Wes Bos (0:24)

Show us, show us the amazing things that you're building. I don't see anything other than you yapping on Twitter.

Welcome to Syntax. We got a potluck episode for you today. What should you be doing? Well, your agent is working. How do you stand out? Is blogging dead? How do you keep your agent on the rails? How much should your employer cover for token spend? How do I get my engineers interested in using AI? And finally, a non-AI question. What are you using for emails? If you have a question, make sure you send it to us. Go to Syntax.fm and click on the potluck button, submit your question, and we will answer it in an upcoming episode. Also, we want to tell you, San Francisco, we are coming to do a Syntax meetup on October 27th at Bear Bottle Brewing. So if you are anywhere near San Francisco, or you want to, dare I say, hop on a plane, train, automobile and come down to San Francisco to hang out with us, we are going to be hosting a meetup October 27th. Go to Syntax.fm forward slash meetup to grab your ticket. It's free, but you do need a ticket to get in. We'll see you there. First question from Alex says, what's the modern day equivalent to blogging? I thought this was a really cool question. A few years ago, writing about technical things was a way to get noticed, showcase your skills and maybe land a job as a developer or product designer. I feel like people don't read blogs as much anymore. What is taking its place? TikTok, Instagram videos. And what do you actually talk about? Are people still interested in seeing someone share their technical knowledge? I'm a product designer and I used to build front-end prototypes. These days, I mostly work with Cloud to make them. I really enjoy the field and what I do. And I'm not looking for a way out, but I don't want to get lost in a sea of people doing the exact same thing. I want to stay relevant. So long story short, how do we promote ourselves now? This is a great question because we even saw when Jev got announced, there was a couple of people being like, we built this and it just didn't have the hilarious Twitter video to get posted with. And as frustrating as it is, it's not enough to simply just build something and put it out there or share anything. That used to be it. That was awesome.

You work really hard on something, you learn a lot about a specific topic, and then you can write a blog post and people will love to hear about that. And now there is just 10,000 times the amount of content out there. That's hard to just get people's attention. And I think there's also a lot of this content is really good, and people like to watch stuff that is well presented and entertaining and whatnot. So how do you promote yourself right now?

Right now, it seems to be that people are looking for opinions, right? There's just so much stuff out there, and people are looking for somebody who has taken the time to figure something out and has garnered some opinion on these new pieces of technology. They have experience with it. Maybe they've done some exploration. Often, the stuff that is most interesting to me is somebody who has been interested in a specific aspect and they have not just done the high-level six prompts and make a demo. They've actually gone into it and used their noggin about how should we best approach this thing? What might it look like if we were to design with our voice? There's all these people that are on the next level of how do we use this stuff to do something that is not just build the same stuff that we've always done, just faster.

And for those people who are able to distill their thoughts cohesively and do it in an interesting manner, I think that those are the people that can promote themselves. The mediums, I still think blog posts are still a great way. You're not going to get the crazy million views, but Hacker News is still mostly just text. And those are the things that are landing on Hacker News. Obviously, posting to social media is very good as well.