Do 60-minute Coding Tasks in 60 Seconds—With AI

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. I go in depth with Steve Krouse, the cofounder and CEO of Val Town, a cloud-based platform to write and deploy code from your browser that promotes collaboration and handles a chunk of the backend workflows. We get into how coding can change the way you think and how Steve thinks about positioning Val Town as AI evolves, and do a live demo of Townie as a way to benchmark AI progress. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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Here’s the most compelling benchmark of AI progress: A task that took 60 minutes a year ago now takes 60 seconds.

In January 2024, researcher Geoffrey Litt and I spent an hour coaxing ChatGPT to build a simple app on this podcast. Nearly 12 months later, Steve Krouse and I built the same app with one prompt in less than minute.

Steve is the cofounder and CEO of Val Town, a cloud-based platform for developers to write, share, and deploy code directly in the browser. In this episode, we used Townie, an AI assistant integrated into Val Town, to build an app that would keep track of time on the podcast, take notes, and generate more questions for the guest. 

Townie had generated the app even before Steve could finish describing it on the show, a mark of how much AI has evolved over the last year. As the founder of a growing startup, Steve tells me his contrarian take on why he isn’t focused on the needs of the non-technical AI programmer, betting instead on being the platform sophisticated developers turn to for backend infrastructure. He also tells me how he started programming and how it continues to shape his vision for Val Town. Here is a link to the episode transcript. (Disclosure: I’m a small investor in Val Town.)

This is a must-watch for founders building AI-powered developer tools, and anyone interested in the future of programming.

Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. 

Go deeper with Steve

Every paid subscribers can read the top takeaways from this episode, such as:

• The theory behind Steve’s formative experience at an afterschool coding program
• Inside Val Town’s AI assistant that can build apps in less than a minute 
• How to architect systems that can capitalize on the next big leap in AI

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