Respite from the Dopamine Machine

**Justin Jackson** (0:08)
Welcome to The Panel, where founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm.

**Brian Casel** (0:17)
And I'm Brian Casel, creator of Builder Methods.

**Justin Jackson** (0:20)
And on the call today, very special guest, long time listener, often in the live chat. I've appeared on his podcast. He's building stuff in Atlanta, Georgia, Ryan Hefner. Welcome to the show, man.

**Brian Casel** (0:35)
Yeah, what's up?

**Ryan Hefner** (0:37)
Happy to be here, obviously a long time listener. And during the panel live streams, there is a certain, I don't know, like want to just kind of dive in and get into that conversation, because all the stuff that you guys are diving into is like the things that are racing through my head constantly. So it's fun to be on here and just kind of riff with y'all.

**Brian Casel** (0:54)
Yeah, it's great to have you on Ryan. Great to catch up with you. It's awesome that you're always in the live chat. And for those who don't know, I don't know if you're still doing it, but you've had one of the long running, like building public podcasts going on and just kind of talking about your real projects over the years. It's been pretty cool to follow.

**Ryan Hefner** (1:12)
I kind of fell off on it a little bit. I'd say around last August, for whatever reason, I think, with the client work that I was doing and then just kind of like, I mean, truthfully, kind of almost kind of like burning out a little bit to a certain degree, you know, like trying to get side stuff going and then balancing the client stuff and like dealing with that kind of stuff. It all kind of got a bit much. So, it was like hard to find like good topics to talk about. But actually, right now, you know, I think with AI and I'm also part of the whole, you know, winter break, AI converted. But basically, I feel like now I have this.

**Brian Casel** (1:48)
So, you were a bit slower than most last year to come around on it?

**Ryan Hefner** (1:52)
You know, I say I wouldn't have fully adopted it. I had co-pilot in my IDEs, like whether that was, you know, VS Code or Cursor. I had dabbled with mostly just kind of like using it as conversation, but not having it do full coding projects at the time, maybe throwing it like a bug here and there. But over the Christmas break, I have a back load of projects that I want to do and domains and all this other stuff. And so I just started spinning up GitHub repos. And while I was playing with my kids, I would just start throwing ideas at it. And then I would just let it rip. And this was the first time where I felt like I was actually getting meaningful output from the models that was legitimately reducing a lot of the boilerplate cruft stuff that you have to do when you're spinning up new projects. And also fleshing out whether it's article templates or landing pages or whatever, but just giving you at least something to hop off on as opposed to just try and come up with the blank canvas issue.
And then I was just hooked. And so now, yeah, like Claude max to the turned up and I get only that 90% news by like Tuesday and my subscription re-ups on Thursday or whatever. So then I got to throttle it to get me through the rest of the week. I've been hittin that max a little bit this week. But Codex too. I think Codex is an amazing... Actually, I started using them when I was actually running out of credits on Claude. And actually, I think for certain languages and certain apps, it actually performs way better. But we can get on to all that, so yeah, that's me. Sorry, I didn't want to get too far into it already. Yeah, perfect.

**Brian Casel** (3:46)
So, today is supposedly my week to host, so I guess I should take the hosting duties today. So yeah, like today, I did prepare a little topic that I think is a little bit of a change of pace. We'll see. And the idea is how we think about our daily drivers across all things, tools, services, just like general things that we choose to use as our daily driver. And I think this, we have a long list here of things that happens in our work lives and are in our personal lives, tools, products, services, and things. And I think what's interesting about this question is like, why have we chose to stuck, why have things really stuck for us long term, even if there are like popular alternatives that didn't stick? It's just kind of fun to talk about those preferences, but what's more interesting is like this idea of product market fit. So let's, we'll get into that stuff, but real quick, why don't we just get like a quick update. I mean, Justin, what's been happening with you last week?