How I Use Claude Code to Run My Entire Work Life (No Coding Required)

1. 0:00 – 1:47

   Intro

   1. AGAakash Gupta0:00

      Claude Code just hit a $2.5 billion run rate, and people are using it to build personal operating systems that run their life

   2. DKDave Killeen0:08

      So I run one command in the morning, and five minutes later, I know what deals need attention, who I'm meeting, what I owe them, and what they owe me. And I didn't gather any of it. The system does it all for me.

   3. AGAakash Gupta0:19

      You've had human executive assistants. Would you say this is better?

   4. DKDave Killeen0:22

      Yeah. It never forgets anything. It never needs to be brought up to speed, and it operates at the speed of our conversation. Everything compounds. All the files get smarter and smarter. They're living files. The more you dance with them, the more useful they become for you and your AI.

   5. AGAakash Gupta0:34

      Dave Killeen. He has worked at BBC, MailOnline, and now he is the Field Chief Product Officer at the PM giant Pendo.io.

   6. DKDave Killeen0:43

      Over the last kind of four weeks, everything's shifted so much with Anthropic and OpenAI now as of this week. That is just-- Your o- mind is always now racing with lots of other things you can be doing and building upon, and it's just crazy times. The mobile app that I have was built in 37 minutes. I spent more time in Xcode trying to get it published onto the phone, but the whole guts of it was there. It is crazy, Aakash.

   7. AGAakash Gupta1:03

      Wow. So we're hyping it up. I have to ask you, what's over-hyped versus under-hyped in AI tooling? Before we go any further, do me a favor and check that you are subscribed on YouTube and following on Apple and Spotify podcasts. And if you want to get access to amazing AI tools, check out my bundle, where if you become an annual subscriber to my newsletter, you get a full year free of the paid plans of Mobbin, Arise, Relay app, Dovetail, Linear, Magic Patterns, DeepSky, Reforge Build, Descript, and Speechify. So be sure to check that out at bundle.aakashg.com, and now into today's episode.

2. 1:47 – 5:43

   Live demo of the daily plan command

   1. AGAakash Gupta1:47

      Dave, welcome to the podcast.

   2. DKDave Killeen1:49

      Hi, Aakash. Delighted to be here. I'm looking forward to showing everyone how I'm using Claude Code.

   3. AGAakash Gupta1:53

      Let's not waste any time. Dave, can you share your screen and show us what happens when you wake up in the morning and open Claude Code?

   4. DKDave Killeen2:00

      Hey there. Can we do a daily plan for the day today, please? Thank you. Love you. Always say love you because I do think it changes how we feel about our AIs, particularly when we're using voice-to-text. Okay, so what's it now gonna do, it's gonna go through and pull everything together. So we have a daily plan command here, essentially, that's baked up. So we have a daily plan command here that's baked in with a whole bunch of goodness, which I'll talk about in a second after it pulls everything together, and it's looking at a whole bunch of material. It's looking at my calendar, which is connected. It's looking at my weekly goals. It's looking at my quarterly goals, um, literally the kitchen sink, and pulling everything together. It pulls in all sorts of data coming from, say, Clari, our sales forecasting tool, coming in from, uh, Granola, all from Granola. All meetings from Granola come in 30 minutes after the meeting's happened, and everything gets pumped in here. You can see down here at the bottom, YouTube intel, LinkedIn intel, email newsletters. A whole bunch of stuff now is coming through. I will have a daily plan page in a sec.

   5. AGAakash Gupta2:53

      Wow. What are we looking at here? What app is this? I'm not familiar with it.

   6. DKDave Killeen2:57

      This app here is Cursor, and it's where I'm doing my work at the moment. And to be honest with you, Cursor's a great place to start for people because what you have here is it's a development environment for engineers typically, but we're seeing an awful lot more people coming into Cursor now, uh, to do non-engineering work, and particularly around kind of creating their own personal operating systems, uh, because essentially it's just a bunch of text files, right? So if you look over here on the left-hand side, I'll just expand it, and there's a whole bunch of noise over here. Quite frankly, I don't even need to know where anything is. But over here, I'll have... Let me just go up to the top here. You'll see a whole power system here in a second, inbox, projects, et cetera, et cetera. I never look at any of it. I just trust that the AI knows where to find things. But essentially, Aakash, everything's a text file, and that's what's so good about it. Everything's a markdown file, actually, which is even better for the AI to dance with. So everything comes in as markdown files appended to existing files, or new files are created, and then the AI is able to do its dance and its shenanigans with you.

   7. AGAakash Gupta3:48

      And you mentioned that it's connected to all these systems. How are they connected? Have you used MCP connections, API connections?

   8. DKDave Killeen3:55

      Typically what I do, uh, MCP is better for AI than the, um, APIs. And so sometimes if I'm trying to get an integration, as we were doing recently with Clari, our sales forecasting tool here at Pendo, I'll just go to the API documentation. I'll tell Claude through voice, "Hey, can you have a look at the API documentation for this? I've got an API key for you. Create me an MCP server." The reason an MCP server is great for this is because actually it acts as better guardrails for the AI to do a more effective dance with the content and bring it in in any way you want. So you could just literally go in and point it at API documentation and go, "Hey, look, we've got this PKM system here right now. Like, knowing what you know of having read the API documentation, how can we make it even better? Like, what could we do? How can we go to town with this?" And literally, it comes back to you and just delights you with lots of other use cases that you might not necessarily have thought of because it's literally just ingested all the API documentation, uh, into your system for you, so it can actually then get some sense of how to build more value for you on top of what you already have.

   9. AGAakash Gupta4:46

      Awesome, and we obviously see that you're not typing, you're talking. So what app are you using for voice-to-text?

   10. DKDave Killeen4:51

       Yeah. I've been a fan for Super Whisper for about three years now, but actually recently now, Whisperflow.ai have come on the market. They got a whole ton of funding, about eighteen million. And so it's increasingly I'm going that way because they've got a whole team, a massive team behind it, rather than Super Whisper. It's just a one-person company right now, and, uh, I'm finding I'm getting a lot more out of Whisperflow. Whisperflow is kind of just press a button, talk to it, and then it just gives you back what you need. Um, Super Whisper is really interesting 'cause it has these different modes. So you can have a mode for giving feedback on a Google Doc, a mode for writing an email, a mode for a Slack message, and essentially it knows what software it's in, and it's able to invoke that mode. Each mode has its own prompt, essentially saying, "Hey, take whatever I've said and turn it into a short Slack message and put a suitable emoji into it." So you can craft those modes with Super Whisper, which is quite cool. Um, but yeah, it depends how much you want to lean into either of those two tools, but Whisperflow seems to be now the one that has the most adoption.

   11. AGAakash Gupta5:39

       Yeah. I made the same switch just recently back over to Whisperflow.

3. 5:43 – 10:13

   Daily plan output and account intelligence

   1. AGAakash Gupta5:43

      So let's take a look. How did this daily plan command do?

   2. DKDave Killeen5:45

      So here's our daily plan, or the one I have, and you can tailor this however you want to. But essentially it comes up with my three things that matter today. I've just redacted some of the information here, which is what's so nice about working with something like this. It's like, it's malleable software, right? You know, I've gone in here and said, "Look, how the hell do I show a PKM system to Aakash [laughs] and lots of other people without revealing anything sensitive for Pendo?" And I said, "Look, if there's any company names, any people, any projects that are sensitive, any dollar data, just redact it for me." And it's done it, right? This is how easy it is now [laughs] to try and work with this software. Just tell it what you want. Tell it what you want improved, and it just does it, right? So anyway, back to the daily plan. We have three things for the day. It's looking at my quarterly goals that I have in here, and how I'm pushing forward on all of that. Gives me my week's, my week's priorities, which I've set at the start of the week, and then what my day should be. And then it even offers up then to book that time out in my diary if I want to. So that's pretty cool. And then it's looking now at, um, some of the accounts that we have here at Pendo and where my help as Field CPO might be needed because it's listening to all of our conversations with customers, and it's pointing out for me at least where I need to be leaning in. I can't be across forty-five enterprise deals every single week and what's happening at the nuance of all those deals, but it can for me and then say, "Hey, look, you might want to reach out to, uh, one of the team here." It even writes me the Slack message to send to the team. So it really is quite powerful, right? YouTube Intelligence looks at all of that, gives me a summary. I don't want to be listening to a hundred YouTube channels. I can't, quite frankly. No one can. [laughs] And so all I do is I have it say, "Hey, look, what's new, novel, and contrarian?" And then tell me what I should be looking at and cluster all that across not just YouTube, but newsletters as well. So that's pretty cool. LinkedIn, I'm doing a lot of outreach obviously on LinkedIn. Are there any people that I should be connecting to that have reached out to me, um, that are maybe even connected to existing accounts here at Pendo? And so again-

   3. AGAakash Gupta7:22

      So just to clarify, this is actually accessing your LinkedIn messages, cross-referencing that against your CRM to understand who you should be responding to.

   4. DKDave Killeen7:31

      Absolutely. I use a tool called PhantomBuster for that, and it's helpful for me to pull that through. And yeah, it's working really nicely now. So it helps me keep on the front foot and make sure that I'm mindful of, you know, key people that I might want to-- I might otherwise miss, right? And then down here then, yeah, market intel signal from just other newsletters, right? I've got like a hundred and twenty newsletters, and everything will-

   5. AGAakash Gupta7:48

      Whoa

   6. DKDave Killeen7:48

      ... comes in here and tells me-Here's why this matters. Here's what you should be thinking about, and here's why it's different. Here's a contrarian novel angle. It's just such a breath of fresh air.

   7. AGAakash Gupta7:58

      Wow.

   8. DKDave Killeen7:58

      We have, Karpathy said recently, like, it's just so hard, right, more than ever before to keep on top of what's going on out there. And so having some system like this that you can just have a chat and craft and then have these cron jobs, essentially, automations that run for you, is just, uh, bonkersly helpful. Here's my Twitter pulse. I mean, there's more information hidden outside the daily page. So if I want to go a deep dive into anything on Twitter that's coming through that's really interesting, that's strong signal, I can do that as well. And then here are some messages then to send to some people where I'm behind on tasks, and it's crafted those messages for me as well.

   9. AGAakash Gupta8:26

      Wow. And it looks like it's even pulled in your analytics data, so you have it connected to every system basically that you have access to in Pendo.

   10. DKDave Killeen8:34

       Everything and anything that I can get my dirty, grubby hands on that has an API, I create an MCP server for and I bring it in. The problem, you know, that everybody has, right, and particularly in larger organizations, but typically just generally, right? We've got so many tools at our disposal, and you're running around like a headless chicken, losing your state of flow to kind of pull the content out. And the best thing about, you know, MCP and why Pendo has created the MCP for Pendo, is that we can let our customers bring that data in, mash it with other data, and create other assets with that data. Everything comes to you on your terms, how you need it and when you need it, and that's the power of MCP for me.

   11. AGAakash Gupta9:07

       All right. And you just did this as a slash command, so I imagine you've created this as a daily plan skill. Is that right?

   12. DKDave Killeen9:13

       Absolutely. There's about a 60, I think, skills in here at the moment, uh, that know when to kick in, and all comes part of Dex, which is this open source tool that I put out there. So one of the skills actually is called an X-ray skill, which I'll show you now. So let me show you that. And the idea is that Dex is something that helps people get their work done more effectively, um, but also at the same time educates you as well about the underlying principles, what's making Dex possible. So right now, if I go in here going, "How the hell that daily command or daily plan come together?" I'll just go in here with voice and go, "Hey, can you just tell me how the daily plan command actually works? Give me an X-ray on that, please. Thank you. Love you." And then in that goes, and it's now going to give me an X-ray. It knows that there's an X-ray skill in here, whose job essentially is to pull the curtains back, Aakash, and create mermaid diagrams, show you how everything's coming together, show you what aspects of Claude Code hooks it's using, and essentially teaching you so that you're then able to make Dex your own. And so the idea is that by dancing in here every day with your own personal work, you're able to not just get your work done faster, but learn AI fluency at a far quicker

4. 10:13 – 11:53

   Ads

   1. DKDave Killeen10:13

      clip.

   2. AGAakash Gupta10:13

      Today's episode is brought to you by Pendo, one of those product management softwares that I've been using for nearly a decade now, which started with things like analytics, but now is much more. It has agent analytics, so you can measure how your agent deployments are doing internally. It has churn prediction so that you can proactively understand this user is about to leave. Let's go take some action. It has guides. It has pretty much everything a product management team might want. So if you want to take your product management team from the old way of working to the new way that we're showcasing in this episode, be sure to book a demo for Pendo. Use the link in the description. If you're a big enterprise account into Mia, you might even get Dave on the call. And now back into today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Jira Product Discovery. If you're like most product managers, you're probably in Jira tracking tickets and managing the backlog. But what about everything that happens before delivery? Jira Product Discovery helps you move your discovery, prioritization, and even road mapping work out of spreadsheets and into a purpose-built tool designed for product teams. Capture insights, prioritize what matters, and create roadmaps you can easily tailor for any audience. And because it's built to work with Jira, everything stays connected from idea to delivery. Used by product teams at Canva, Deliveroo, and even The Economist. Check out why and try it for free today at atlassian.com/product-discovery. That's A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-N.com/product-discovery. Jira Product Discovery, build the right thing.

5. 11:53 – 16:46

   Claude Code terminal vs Cursor

   1. AGAakash Gupta11:53

      And you use Claude from the Cursor agent. So you're actually not using Claude in the terminal, which a lot of people are scared about. You're just using Cursor's chat.

   2. DKDave Killeen12:01

      For, for the purpose of this demo, because I can show other files, I'm actually using Cursor. But actually, what I spend a lot more time in now is in the terminal itself, because what Claude has is it has these things called Claude Code hooks, which we can come onto in a second, that get invoked at various different parts at different times in your conversation. So one that's really valuable for me and that fundamentally shifts how I get value out of Dex is, is a session start hook. So every time you go into a new session, the session start hook is able to essentially pull in other context into an otherwise empty context, an empty chat. So it can pull in my weekly priorities. It can pull in my projects. It can pull in learnings, mistakes that we've made together, and it injects that in to make sure those learnings don't happen again. So therefore, the more you dance with something like Dex in terminal, it actually compounds its brilliance over time. So I spend more of my time in terminal because Anthropic make those features available within terminal rather than within Cursor, probably because of some kind of strategic positioning, I would imagine. Um, but yeah, you get far better use out of this when you are in terminal compared to, uh, compared to Cursor.

   3. AGAakash Gupta13:00

      Got it. So we were looking at this daily plan, and it was gonna tell us about what it, how it actually works. What did it result in?

   4. DKDave Killeen13:06

      What I'm gonna do instead, Aakash, is I'm just gonna issue the X-ray command itself. Okay.

   5. AGAakash Gupta13:11

      Yeah. The promise of skills is that they'll get invoked, but actually you generally need to use a slash command or say, "Use X skill."

   6. DKDave Killeen13:19

      Exactly that.Okay, so here is the x-ray command in action. We've asked it to tell us how the daily plan is being pulled together, and the x-ray skill itself has been told to, like, do its storytelling through mermaid diagrams, right? So if I just pull this up here, you can get some sense of how that is working. Bit of a bug in terms of its display here. But I type plan, and then it will check yesterday's review. It will read all of the intel digests, generate what's missing, pull structured data together from the MCP, and then from there will give you what you need. So there's a whole bunch of stuff in here where it's pulling in these files. And so essentially what it's gonna do is it's gonna see before it does its daily plan what files have already been populated. So has it actually done its intel on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and brought all that stuff in? If it hasn't, it will then execute it. So that in itself is really helpful to get everything pulled in every day. And then the next stage then, it will then pull in all of my commitments, all my tasks, all my weekly priorities. And again, all that then gets injected into every fresh chat, which is fantastic.

   7. AGAakash Gupta14:16

      Awesome. So what is the next command you might be running with Claude Code in your day?

   8. DKDave Killeen14:21

      So now we pulled the daily plan together and we now have a plan for the day. What I'll then do is have a quick look to see if any of my accounts have moved over the last 24 hours with the AE team here at Pendo. So I'll go in and do the following. Can you give me a health score please for, uh, the accounts? Thank you. And that will then invoke the next skill, which is the health score skill. And so you'll see that all come together in a second.

   9. AGAakash Gupta14:38

      So this is another skill that you've created, health score. So part of the key to an operating system is having these compounding skills that Dave is talking about. You create a first draft with AI, you prompt it, you keep improving those skills, and now he has, like, an account health score skill that you guys are gonna see the output of.

   10. DKDave Killeen14:55

       I'll pull up the pre-canned. Uh, can you pull up the pre-canned skill for, um, the health score, please? Okay. Okay, and my second skill for the day then is just having a quick check across all the deals that need my attention, where the health of those accounts are at, what I need to be doing, what I need to be leaning into, and how I need to be helping the team. Really, really helpful having this, and it means then I can just focus on where I'm most needed, but I don't have to wait for people to come to me. I can proactively lean in and do that myself.

   11. AGAakash Gupta15:19

       So we've just looked at the account health scores. Now, how do we bring in more external information to help us understand what to do?

   12. DKDave Killeen15:25

       Yeah. So what I've done is I've created another skill, uh, which basically looks at, it runs a command, runs a search against the GitHub, um, API every morning, and then will pull in any repos that it finds which connects to the DEX PQM system. And so what I've got here now in front of you that you can see here is it ranks everything, right? It's ranking it based on its level of enthusiasm. It's telling us how it would be actually useful for something like DEX. What it's calling out here is a Screenpipe, um, GitHub repo, which basically looks at your screen and is able to figure out, like, pick up other sentiment, um, other actions you might not have put into your system for you. Bit controversial if people want Screenpipe running in something like DEX, so haven't done anything with it just yet. But the idea here is you've got a whole bunch of repos that it's pulling in and is telling, "This is why we might wanna be using this for DEX and how we could use it," which is fantastic, right? And then what I got separately then, I got a DEX backlog. So there's another command in here, and what that will then do is collect my ideas that I'm coming up with, um, and then it will rank it based on impact, alignment, token efficiency, all that kind of gubbins. Um, and then it will then, uh, take ideas also from the AI as well, and then have a scoring, uh, competition essentially between myself and the AI. And then any of these ideas that I wanna flesh out on, I can just basically pick this up, throw it into a chat, and then have the whole thing fleshed out into PRD, hand it over to the AI, and then have the whole thing then built.

   13. AGAakash Gupta16:41

       Wow. Can we see that? How do we go to from here to what we have raw to a

6. 16:46 – 21:42

   From backlog idea to a full PRD

   1. AGAakash Gupta16:46

      PRD?

   2. DKDave Killeen16:46

      Okay, so let's just pick up this idea here. It's idea number three, and then I'm gonna ask DEX to, uh, work on it. I've no idea what it's gonna come up with, but let's give it a go. Okay, from the DEX backlog, can you work on idea number three please and come up with a PRD for me? I want you to think about how you can make this absolutely brilliant, 10X it. Don't settle for anything mediocre. Think about something that will make this brilliantly serendipitous, massively delightful. And I always, by the way, Aakash, feel like just keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it on your prompt and make it really emotional, and it really responds, I find, particularly with this 4.6. It gets quite excited with you, uh, when you really kind of push itself. Let's go with this and see what we have. It's gonna take everything, by the way, I've just said to you, so I'll get rid of that. Okay, and da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Okay, let's do this.

   3. AGAakash Gupta17:28

      This is my favorite part. And I'm curious, as a field CPO, are you writing PRDs? Are you getting that close to the ICPM work?

   4. DKDave Killeen17:36

      No, no. I think with AI, it's all about the taste, right? I mean, you could go to town and go, "Okay, implement the entire backlog here." That's just Frankenstein territory, right? You have to have some sense that this is something that will be worthwhile. But also taste when it comes to the AI coming back to you and saying to you, "Here's what we think we could be doing," and really spotting, you know, that element of brilliance from it. And so really for me, you're just judging at a very, very high level. And then of course, it comes into the UI side of things, and you really need to lean in there. But there's a whole bunch of fantastic applications like magicpatterns.ai that lets you then take that PRD, throw that in there, and it will come up with a fantastic AI, uh, UI for you. So very much, um, far less than I used to be doing over the last 25 years for sure, being in the weeds, but it's fantastic. You're just orchestrating everything and, and orchestrating this sense of taste and delight, which is brilliant. One of the analogies I've been giving before is it's a bit like we're all Michelin, or head chefs of restaurants, right? Of Michelin-starred restaurants. And we're not in the kitchen doing all the gubbins. We're literally just, we design the menu, and we have, you know, the AI chefs in the kitchen doing it for us, and I think that's where we're all at right now.

   5. AGAakash Gupta18:34

      Brilliant. And you guys can get a free year of Magic Patterns Pro if you sign up for Aakash's bundle.

   6. DKDave Killeen18:39

      All right. So we'll wait for this to come through, and then we can just cut all those gubbins out.

   7. AGAakash Gupta18:42

      So it's fun to see actually what the AI is building because it's very thorough. People are used to, hey, the first time I prompted ChatGPT for a PRD in 2023, it was a garbage output. But when you're prompting it for a PRD inside your operating system that has all your context, that has all your MCP servers, you can see it's doing a very careful job of using all of that information.

   8. DKDave Killeen19:05

      It's fantastic. I think the challenge you end up having, Aakash, is that you end up having so many, uh, PRDs, um, that are kind of being cooked up. And where we get to, and you see this on X quite a lot being talked about, is a sense of nearly overwhelm in a way, um, because you go back into it and you're juggling, like, you know, many parallel agents at the same time. Many PRDs are kind of in flight, and it becomes, you know, just difficult to stay on top of everything. What was it we were doing 10 minutes ago? The cognitive overhead becomes difficult. But I can show you in a second one thing I've been building, essentially is a Kanban board. So I now have all of my PRDs. I can see what I've shipped. And when I go into each of the cards, it has the PRD in there, and I just press play, right? The AI even ranks everything for me and says, "This is what we should be doing next to move this forward." And so again, this comes back to this whole concept of malleable software, that you can just go, "I've got a pain point here. Like, how do I solve this?" And straight away now it's built me a Kanban board system that I can then manage everything with a kind of a calmer state of mind and a more focused state of mind as well.

   9. AGAakash Gupta19:59

      And people might be listening to this and saying, "Okay, it's automating our job away. We're one step away." But I think the key point here is even if you have awesome cooks in the kitchen, you still need the head Michelin chef exercising taste. So while we're giving you guys a lot of tools to create infinite slop, it's your goal to then figure out, how do I refine that slop? Find the good stuff, finesse the good stuff, and only present that out to your teammates. And not be shy to say, "Hey, team, here's a PRD. I created it with AI." So that they don't suddenly say, "Oh, he's putting his stamp on this slop."

   10. DKDave Killeen20:33

       Agree. Agree. And, and also have the AI, you know, come back to you and, uh, and grill you, right? I did something the other day where I've been adding in all these other skills and, and people feeding back from, you know, early use of DEX are like, "There's a lot of skills in here, Dave." Like, you know, and it be- it becomes overwhelming to remember everything. And I had the AI kind of look at the entire code base and go, "Just grill me on this." And it said, "Dave, like, you're building a system more for yourself than for others." It was brutal to me, right? And I said, "Hmm, you're probably true." [laughs] You know? I've never written software before really to be like this. And so it came back and said, "This is what we need to do, Dave. You know, we need to tidy all this up. We've got to do, do, do, do." It's literally being this fantastic sparring partner for me, but holding me to account. And, um, and so yeah, so now my Claude MD file has a bunch of these, what it calls harsh truths for Dave that it's injected into my Claude MD file to say, "There's a bit of a shit show going on here. We need to tidy this up." So every time, again, I dance with the AI in a new chat, Claude MD file gets invoked, and it knows that we actually have to be conscious of the sprawl, uh, element that we've had in the last week or two. So it's, um, yeah, you're right. We need taste, but also use the AI to kind of just hold us to account. Uh, and I think that's, uh, hugely effective when you start le- le- leaning into it that

7. 21:42 – 25:02

   The Claude MD file walkthrough

   1. DKDave Killeen21:42

      way.

   2. AGAakash Gupta21:42

      So while the PRD is generating, can we take a look at that Claude MD file?

   3. DKDave Killeen21:46

      Yep. Let me pull it up for you now.

   4. AGAakash Gupta21:47

      And that trick, guys, that he's doing there to open preview, make sure you do that because it's a pain to look at markdown files with all of those-

   5. DKDave Killeen21:54

      It's-

   6. AGAakash Gupta21:54

      ... pound symbols

   7. DKDave Killeen21:56

      ... annoying. Cursor, it's actually on their forums. You'll see me on the forums whinging about it every month. Don't know why they can't fix it, but there used to be a setting that by default it would open up in preview. Anyway, but yeah. Yeah, don't. And then the... So here is the Claude MD file. All right, so it's got the DEX product identity. It's got this really important bit of how to spar with me, right? You know, stress test against the ICP. DEX is for people who are not engineers. Check the bloat radar, right? Is this replacing something or is it one more thing? You know, and it's just really, really, really good here. And then there's a whole bunch of, they call it with, um, Claude progressive disclosure. So you don't want your Claude MD t- MD file to be too big. You want it to be nice and, uh, short, but then to act as a map to go off and springboard for the AI into other files where it might need it. And that keeps then performance, uh, quite tight and quite, quite effective. Got a whole bunch of behaviors. There's a whole bunch of work in progress. A whole bunch of like how I just basically want to be dancing, uh, with the AI every time I have a new session with it. The Claude MD file is good. It's not always adhered to, and that's why I think, you know, the Claude MD file is good guidance. But that's why having session start hooks with Claude Code is super effective because it means that actually you start that session and it always adheres to whatever is in that session start hook, um, every single time. But this is a good principle to have. Always lean into your Claude MD file. Always when you're in Claude, like go in, go back into Claude into the AI and just say, "Look, can you just... Let's do an audit," right? "You've got my whole system here. Do an audit on my Claude MD file. Tidy it up. Figure out how we can do progressive disclosure to make it more efficient. Tell me like, you know, what of it we can move into maybe a session start hook, for example, if we're in terminal for Claude Code." Just have the AI guide you on how to make everything optimal, and then you're off to the races.

   8. AGAakash Gupta23:31

      And one thing I will warn you guys, because I've done hundreds of iterations on my Claude MD file, push to GitHub so that you have a version-controlled version of your Claude MD file. Because there have been many times that I've seen a regression in my Claude MD file performance and I want to revert back, and you're only gonna have that if you're pushing to GitHub. So it's completed the PRD. Can we take a look at that and honestly judge it?

   9. DKDave Killeen23:54

      Let's have a look at it. Okay. So it's, okay, got some dependencies. It's recognized that there's some other stuff, um, by, um, Tobi, the founder of Shopify, came out with something quite good, which is called QMD, which is a repo on GitHub that allows you to have really token-efficient search within your, uh, within your laptop essentially. And so I've been playing around with that at the moment, so it recognizes that there might be some overlap with this particular capability that we've already worked with. Vision statement's good. Problem statement's-

   10. AGAakash Gupta24:17

       As a CPO, if some PM on your team gave you this PRD, what would you rate it?

   11. DKDave Killeen24:22

       Right now there's nothing commercial on it, which is missing. But-

   12. AGAakash Gupta24:25

       Mm

   13. DKDave Killeen24:25

       ... DEX is open source, so arguably that's why not. But I want to know, you know, strategically, commercially, like what are we doing here rather than kind of fixing a pain point for a user. What exists today. This is good, right? Because it's telling you the last thing you want to be doing as a CPO is kind of having your team increase more bloat into the system. So it's saying there are other things that we can actually leverage, which is great. Other components, QMD I just mentioned. It's a good starting point, but you might want to kind of use this as a way to kind of just get a bit tied to what those metrics actually are, how you're measuring it, what the baseline is. If it's a improvement on a feature. Non-goals, that's good.

   14. AGAakash Gupta24:53

       So overall it feel like it's a strong first draft, but it needs editing.

   15. DKDave Killeen24:57

       To be honest-

   16. AGAakash Gupta24:57

       Let's pretend we've edited it. How do... You sh- talked about this Kanban board feature.

8. 25:02 – 28:38

   Kanban board for managing PRDs

   1. AGAakash Gupta25:02

      Can you show us that?

   2. DKDave Killeen25:03

      But just on that point about it being a strong first draft, to be honest, what I've been doing over the last few weeks is not even going into PRDs. I'm just accepting it. Literally I'm vibe CPO-ing or whatever, right? Um, because typically it just is on the money, and the AI is able to work out the edge cases and build things for you. And so I wouldn't even waste time going into the PRD, to be honest with you. Um-

   3. AGAakash Gupta25:22

      Mm

   4. DKDave Killeen25:22

      ... I mean, I'm in a luxurious position. I'm building software which doesn't gotta connect to, you know, anything else, um, commercially. Um, but uh, but typically it is good. So I would just try and play, build things yourself away from work and, uh, and see how those PRDs that are given to you are actually good enough to start building with.

   5. AGAakash Gupta25:38

      Mm.

   6. DKDave Killeen25:39

      Let me pull up, um, this system. So let me show you now what I've been doing because, um, a lot of people are saying to me, "Look, I don't want to be in Cursor. I don't want to be in Terminal, but I really like the idea of having files on my computer that the AI can dance with." So I went in, I spent three hours last week, literally three hours, and I said, "Look, can you create me this ex- this experience where I can actually access these files in a web UI, right?" And it's built it, right? And so that's what this is, and I'm currently working on it, and it's good. It's kind of, you know, it's kind of quite concierge-like. It's telling me what I need to be doing next, all that kind of, kind of governs. And then the, the piece then that was kind of getting crazy for me was like all of these ideas, all the backlog that you just saw recently, uh, earlier is too much, right? So now I've got all of these ideas here. Everything's in here. It's all ready to go. The PRD that you saw will be in here, right? That's the one we just had here a second ago. It's even scored it in terms of points, right? It's crazy. I mean, I'm just adding features in and, uh, and it's being really, really helpful for me to kind of get some sense of like, what should I be working on next? I'll just go down here, have a chat with it, go, "Right, go build." And then when it starts building-I then pick up something else. Go build, go build. And so you have these things then working together, uh, in parallel, I should say, um, where they're building separately. So again, this whole idea of malleable software is so effective because I was like, "This is my pain, this is what I need. Can you design it?" It doesn't look pretty. I can fix that with magic patterns, um, quite, uh, our magic path, uh, uh, later on. But, um, it's brilliant. It's really, really, really helpful.

   7. AGAakash Gupta26:52

      And what are we looking at here? What software is this?

   8. DKDave Killeen26:55

      This is just, like, sitting on a local host, right?

   9. AGAakash Gupta26:57

      Oh, cool.

   10. DKDave Killeen26:58

       Um, so it's all kind of React, and that's what it is. And I might build, like, maybe an Electron app.

   11. AGAakash Gupta27:02

       Mm-hmm.

   12. DKDave Killeen27:02

       I might distribute it, um, that way. Um, I'm thinking I might have maybe a mobile app, right? But the thing is, all I need to do is go in and have a chat, and the whole thing's built. The mobile app that I have was built in 37 minutes. I spent more time in Xcode trying to get it, you know, pu- published onto the phone, but the, the whole guts of it was there. So it is crazy, Aakash, what you can do now. You just have the chat, have your taste, and then guide it along. Make sure you don't have too much in here on the left. I do have at the moment. I need to kind of go through a heavy purge on all of this. But like I say, build the software for however you work, and it's, uh, just brilliantly effective. The other day, I was, like, doing an article and, um, I was trying to work with AI to kind of edit it for me, and it just turned the article into complete mess. And so I thought, "Hold on a second. Let's build an app." And so now I... Actually, something similar to what I can show you here. So I can go in here. Imagine this is the article. I go into edit mode here, and I go in, highlight this, and I basically annotation say, "Look, I don't want this piece in here," right? Change it. For my annotations generally, imagine this was like a YouTube summary of something, um, or my intel digest coming through from, you know, market movement. I can go in here and go, "Oh, this is really interesting here. Let me just go in and just annotate this." And when I annotate this and give it a tag, I can then chat with my tags. Show me, like, the key metrics I've seen externally competitively that I've been tagging for the last... I mean, that might not be for everybody, but it's how I like to work. And then I can just chat with that subset of content, right? Create content based off of it, create a report based off it, whatever I might want to do. But you have this way now of dancing with your thoughts, um, as they come through, as you form them. And, uh, and that for me is like the, uh, just this idea of me being able to build this software for however I want to work and play with it and go, "Do you know what? Actually, it's too much. Kill it, please." You've got that freedom. It's just so, so sexy.

   13. AGAakash Gupta28:37

       Love it. So we've

9. 28:38 – 31:00

   Career planning with the career MCP server

   1. AGAakash Gupta28:38

      walked through, you guys, the daily plan, the PRD creation, the Claude MD, the Kanban board. This is the life cycle of a lot of the PM work we're gonna do. But we promised you an operating system. An operating system is also gonna help you with your career, with your goals. Can you show us how the operating system can help with that?

   2. DKDave Killeen28:56

      So what I'm gonna pull together now is just to show you how the career planning piece works. A lot of what we do is we're very, very good at shipping features, all of that, um, but we don't really look after our own personal roadmap so much. And so what I wanted to pull in here was this ability to actually look at holistically longer term, your career goals, your annual reviews. Any of the feedback you get gets collected through DEX into a feedback system and gets matched up with where you want to be and the conversations you want to be having at the end of the year coming to review time. Um, but at the same time, you want those longer term goals to kind of connect into your quarterly goals and your weekly planning. So there's a, an MCP server in here which is called a career MCP server, which I just went in, had a chat, say, "Build me this server. I want to make sure there's a nice tight logic that as an MCP server it's making sure happens." Uh, and then it's been quite magical what it's been doing. Let me quickly show you through X-Ray. Okay, so I've just done a, an X-Ray on the career MCP, and what it's now doing is it's showing me how the whole thing works. And so essentially, what it will do is it will scan for evidence. So as I dance with the AI every week, it's listening in for evidence to hoover in, whether it might be Granola transcripts or whatever, to bring that in so that evidence compounds over time. Um, it's now looking at skills gap analysis. So based on what I've, evidence I have, the gaps I need to close, it's coming up with, again, guidance on all of that, and then looking at a promotion readiness score at the end of all of that. So it's at a very, very high level. There's a lot more behind it I won't go into now. Let me just pull in what I've got for myself. So I said, "Show me visually on a mermaid how my career goals are laddering into my quarterly goals, which ladders into my weekly goals. To what extent am I off? What should I be thinking about doing more of, and is my quarterly planning for this quarter the right things to be pushing on?" So honest assessment. Thought leadership, really, really strong. What's broken? I have, um, not done too much in terms of expanding my strategic influence over the last few weeks across the wider business. That's because I'm focused on other stuff. And so it's saying for your quarterly goals, though you, you don't have any weekly activity at all, X, Y, Z. So across these four quarterly goals, these are missing gaps right now, which is fantastic, right? Because that means then as I'm doing my weekly planning, it then tells me where there might be gaps that I need to be leaning more into, which is just superb.

10. 31:00 – 33:42

    Ads

    1. AGAakash Gupta31:00

       Today's episode is brought to you by Amplitude. Replays of mobile user engagement are critical to building better products and experiences, but many session replay tools don't capture the full picture. Some tools take screenshots every second, leading to choppy replays and high storage costs from enormous capture sizes. Others use wireframes, but key moments go missing, creating gaps in your understanding. Neither approach gives you a truly mobile experience. Amplitude does things differently. Their mobile replays capture the full experience, every tap, every scroll, and every gesture, with no lag and no performance hit. It's the most accurate way to understand mobile behavior. See the full story with Amplitude. Today's episode is brought to you by NayaOne. In tech buying, speed is survival. How fast you can get a product in front of customers decides if you will win. If it takes you nine months to buy one piece of tech, you're dead in the water. Right now, financial services are under pressure to get AI live. But in a regulated industry, the roadblocks are real. NayaOne changes that. Their air-gapped, cloud-agnostic sandbox lets you find, test, and validate new AI tools much faster, from months to weeks, from stuck to shift. If you're ready to accelerate AI adoption, check out NayaOne.At NayaOne.com/aakash. That's N-A-Y-A-O-N-E.com/A-A-K-A-S-H. I hope you're enjoying today's episode. Are you interested in becoming an AI product manager, making hundreds of thousands of dollars more joining OpenAI and Anthropic? Then you might want to do a course that I've taken myself, the AI PM certificate ran by OpenAI product leader Miqdad Jaffer. If you use my code and my link, you get a special discount on this course. It is a course that I highly recommend. We have done a lot of collaborations together on things like AI product strategy, so check out our newsletter articles if you want to see the quality of the type of thinking you'll get. One of my frequent collaborators, Pavel Hern, is the Build Labs leader, so you're gonna live build an AI product with Pavel's feedback if you take this AI PM certificate. So be sure to check that out. Be sure to use my code and my link in order to get a special discount. And now back into today's episode. Wow. And so that resonated with you, and you felt like that was on-point feedback?

    2. DKDave Killeen33:13

       Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I'm mindful of it. But what's great there is when you go into your weekly plan, you just do your forward slash weekly plan, it's able to say to you, "This is what I think you should be doing. Based on what I've heard over the last few calls, over the last week, based on what you've been doing within Cursor, within Dex, this- these are the gaps, and you're leaning far too much in over here. You need to course-correct, invest more in over here because these are goals you have up in the next eight, eight, nine weeks. You need to pull your socks up on these areas. Here's how I suggest you do it." It's just brilliant. It's bonkers.

    3. AGAakash Gupta33:40

       All right. So we've given everybody the high level.

11. 33:42 – 36:36

    Skills vs MCP servers vs hooks explained

    1. AGAakash Gupta33:42

       I want to make this super clear for people. Can we show people what's the difference between a skill, an MCP, and how you're gonna use those?

    2. DKDave Killeen33:49

       So skills, as we saw earlier, sometimes they get invoked or not, and it's a bit like the Claude MD file. It's a little bit... It just misbehaves sometimes. But a skill at its core is essentially a job description that you give to your AI so it knows what those steps are to do once you, um, issue a, a, a skill. They actually call them commands now at Anthropic. Skills and commands have come together. But what you have is then on the left, you've got that job description, plain English instructions on what to be doing, and then MCP is very different. MCP is those guardrails I've talked about before, where it tells you how to be interacting with other services, what steps to be following. It's just far tighter and making sure that things are a lot more deterministic and far less probabilistic in your system. So what I've done is I've created a task MCP server because I want my tasks to be created in a consistent way all the time. I always want to make sure the AI is knowing to look for certain pillars to attach my tasks to, to look for certain projects that are connected to those tasks and infer what projects they are. If you deal with a skill, it might not necessarily always follow those steps. MCP, on the other, other hand, makes sure that it always, always happens. And so it's a far, far better way to actually, um... So it's a far, far better way to make sure that your system is tighter, uh, than you'd otherwise have it.

    3. AGAakash Gupta34:57

       Awesome. And one of the cool things is that you can actually use a skill, an MCP, to reach outside your system. MCP, we've seen how it's pulling data into your system. So we were talking about skills in MCP. If somebody wants to create a skill for themselves, how do they do that?

    4. DKDave Killeen35:13

       Yeah. Good question. Let me go, let's go and do one. Hey, I'd like you to create a skill for me that would look at, um, pulling in all the GitHub trending repositories that you're collecting in that repository MD file and would then take them and recommend the top 10 to me, um, every week from the last week, and then I will then invoke the skill, and then you'll give me everything and tell me exactly why you think these repository- repositories are useful and worth our time looking at in the context of the Dex operating system. And, Aakash, it's literally that simple. Just have a chat with it, and then it's now gonna create then the skill file itself. And now what we'll do then is we'll just wait for this to go through. It's just crazy, isn't it?

    5. AGAakash Gupta35:48

       [laughs]

    6. DKDave Killeen35:49

       So funny, Aakash. Like, I normally sleep very, very well. Over the last kind of four weeks, everything's shifted so much with Anthropic and OpenAI now as, as of this week. That is just... Your mind is always now racing with lots of, um, other things you can be doing and building upon, and it's just crazy times. Okay, here's a skill file. So it's now pulled everything together. It's worked out all the steps. It's telling me what information to be pulling in, and it's now applying the filter. It's, it's literally, you can see it's gone to town on this, right? I would never know how to create this. I just go in, have a chat in my voice, and it gives everything. It's come up with a format for me. I mean, I can edit this if I want to, but quite frankly, I can't be bothered. And I've got it, right? That's all it. That's it. Everything's here, and my skill now is ready to go, just like it's been taken out of the oven. Crazy, crazy, crazy.

    7. AGAakash Gupta36:32

       And then to invoke this, guys, as we talked about, just /repo-radar.

12. 36:36 – 40:11

    Intelligence scanning across YouTube and newsletters

    1. AGAakash Gupta36:37

       So one of the coolest things I see you doing that other people aren't is intelligence scanning. Can you walk us through it?

    2. DKDave Killeen36:43

       So what I've got it doing is, is pulling in, and I just went onto the AI and I said, "Look, I want you to download YouTube transcripts for, like, these, you know, 60 channels, including yourself, Aakash. Bring the transcripts into my system. Create MD files for each of the transcripts. Do the same for all the 50 or so whatever newsletters I follow, and bring all that in and all the bookmarks I have on Twitter." And it brings everything in, and then it clusters everything. So it's bringing things signaled together from different sources. So you can see Nate's newsletter here, Chamath, um, Lenny, and it talks about this whole same thing, but really pulling it together about what's novel, what's contrarian about what you're seeing here, which is really, really good. So I'm not having to go into, like, too much content, but I'm really getting a good sense of what's interesting, what's contrarian, why it matters to me as Field CPO, and I've got that coming to me now every single day, which is giving me a lot more comfort that I'm keeping on top of things. If I want to drill in, I can drill into stuff. There's other files in my system that let me do that, but right now, this for me is absolute gold. That combined with also separately, like I showed you earlier, looking at all the trending repos on GitHub and telling what's going on there as well that I might want to be interested in is, uh, absolutely a huge comfort blanket and really, really interesting in terms of being able to spar then with those ideas.

    3. AGAakash Gupta37:49

       So one of the biggest differences from using an operating system like this compared to ChatGPT, your ChatGPT conversation just lives in the cloud. Maybe ChatGPT encodes it into its memory, but it's not a compounding system. What is the thing about this compounding that people need to know?

    4. DKDave Killeen38:07

       I think very simply, like, having all this information come into your files, if you have a project and then that project hears through the s-system that there's a new Granola meeting with actions from it, or there's a new angle from a stakeholder on that call, that gets appended to the stakeholder's person page, to the projects page, to the company page if there's a company connected to it. So every time the AI then later pulls on that information, that particular entity, it's gonna have all that fresh context. So you have these living files, which then just get better and better and more useful for you the more you dance with the AI, the more the AI dances with your MCP servers. And that's the fundamental difference. You're just chatting to ChatGPT, and it's not got that context. It's not got that memory really that you understand quite what it knows of you. Here, you can just ask it, like, "What do you know of this particular project? Where are we at with it?" It will know where to look. The AI's fantastic, as of 4.6 at Opus in particular, to really be that dependable partner to lean in and find the right information for you and show you your otherwise blind spots.

    5. AGAakash Gupta39:03

       And you have this DEX improve command in there. Can you walk us through how that works?

    6. DKDave Killeen39:09

       So the DEX improve command basically will look at, um, all of the change log with Claude Code. It will do that once a week for you. But if you trigger it like I triggered it here, you will then do a search and see what's been released from Anthropic over the last X time, and then it will also look at anything going on on Hacker News, in Reddit communities. It's just quite frankly bonkers, right? And so with that, then, it scans all of that and says, "Okay, I've done all my homework. Now what do you want to do? Have you got an idea, Dave? Or do you want to just find out what's new, or do you want me to have a full audit of the entire system? How should we dance together here?" And I'll just say, "Look, tell me how we should go about adding extra capability in here, anything released from Anthropic over the last month that we should be aware of." It then does all its work and comes up with all of this here, right? [laughs] So new capabilities have come out, right? I now don't have to check anything. It's all coming to me, and it's telling me why it matters for DEX and how we can be leveraging it. Whole bunch of information, really, really useful. And now it's going, "Right, this is what we should do in this order. These are the items we should work on first. Would you like me to build it, Dave? Thank you, Dave." I mean, honest to God, Aakash, it is madness.

    7. AGAakash Gupta40:07

       So what we're doing at this point is we're deep diving on the critical topics people need to understand.

13. 40:11 – 44:58

    Hooks deep dive and session start hooks

    1. AGAakash Gupta40:11

       We just walked in them through the compounding system. The next one is hooks. I see a lot of people getting this wrong. What do people need to know about hooks?

    2. DKDave Killeen40:19

       So first of all, make sure that you're using Claude Code in terminal or on Claude Code desktop, because hooks that we're about to go through now are only available there. They're not available in Cursor. Hooks are magical and really changes how you use Claude Code. Hooks basically get invoked at different parts of your chat with, um, with Claude. I use the session start hook because I want basically every time I go into a new chat, I want that chat to be primed with the right context. As you mentioned earlier, there is a Claude MD file, but it's not that dependable. Sessions ho- start hooks are like the guarantor. Make sure that every single moment you're having that new chat, the right context comes in. So it will then have my strategic pillars, it'll have my quarterly goals, it'll have my weekly priorities. So straightaway it knows what I'm doing and how I'm connecting up. It has all my tasks, has working preferences. So every time now I go back into Claude and I'm having a back-and-forth with it, if ever I say, "Hey, Claude, you bloody idiot," you know, [laughs] "Why did you do that?" It can pick that up. It can listen for that and inject that into a re- working preferences file, which compounds over time. Likewise, any time it makes a mistake and it sees it makes a mistake itself, I've got a mistakes file which it writes to, and it's unbelievable. I can show it to you if you want to, but, like, all of the mistakes we've had, uh, together, and that also then gets injected so those mistakes don't happen again. So everything then just compounds and gets better and better. Bit like compound engineering for engineers. That's kind of using an awful lot of Claude Code hooks. I just felt from a first principles point of view, how can we use hooks for knowledge management to make sure that our PKM system, our personal knowledge management system, gets smarter the more you dance with it? And that's what hooks are.

    3. AGAakash Gupta41:45

       So we've walked people through the system. At this point, they want to know, "How do I make this mine? How do I get started and onboard into it?"

    4. DKDave Killeen41:51

       So everything's up here in GitHub, has been out there for a few weeks now, and it's getting a ton of traction. And essentially, it is for non-engineers, and it's fairly straightforward to set up. You go into this section here. It will take you through step by step, written for non-engineers, on what you need to do. This might look a little bit messy, downloading Node.js and all that gubbins, but ultimately just follow the steps. It's very straightforward. And then you're up and running. And then when you're in the system, whether it's in terminal or whether it's in Cursor, I'll quickly now move over back into Cursor and show you then how to get that set up there. So all I'll just do, I'll just do quickly onboarding, and then we're done. And I'll just quickly take you through. It takes about two or three minutes. So you go in and you take that repo URL from GitHub, throw that in here once you've set up your Cursor to be able to do this kind of thing, instructions are on the repo, and then you download, uh, the whole thing. I'll create a folder. I'll call it whatever. And then it creates that. It pulls essentially all the source code down. So I'll then open all that up, and now you're in your version of, um, of DEX, right? So it's now all your own. You can see all the files over here, all pulled down. And simply then you just go through and type in /setup, and then you're off to the races. Once you do that, then it will guide you through and then ask you for your name, ask you for your role. I think there's about 30 roles or something in here. And depending on which role you have, from CMO to CEO down to whatever you might be doing, uh, then it will unfurl the scaffolding around that and then get you all set up. Uh, it will listen in for your iCal, for your calendar. It will listen in to see if you've got Granola in here. Uh, and then you can also integrate then your Gmail and others, uh, other, other, other sources of data as well. So yeah, I'll just go through, select my size of company, and, um, and then it's gonna say, "Hey, look, what are your roles? What, what are your goals? What are you doing?" Um, and then I'll just go through and I'll say, "Yeah, look, um, all of them are my goals, thank you," in the interest of time. And it'll go through more and more steps, and within about five minutes, then your setup is going to know, um, where your Granola meetings are, if you have Granola, and it will then know what your calendar is, and so on. So all that gets, gets pulled in, and it just guides you through then setting up your goals, setting up your weekly plan, um, and all of that. Then you're off to the races.

    5. AGAakash Gupta43:52

       So we've walked people through Claude Code. When should people be using Claude Code versus Cursor versus Claude Cowork?

    6. DKDave Killeen44:00

       Depending on where you're at, right, I think starting, um, definitely starting Cursor if you can, and don't be intimidated by it. Don't worry about that messy left-hand rail of the files. Just trust the AI to file things the way it should be, and you're pretty much good to go. Then if you want to then take avail of, you know, making sure that, you know, those hooks can be used, uh, and the system improves and gets better and better over time, move yourself into terminal. On Mac, Ghostty, uh, G-H-O-S-T-T-Y, I think it's called, is really, really good. It's a cleaner terminal. It feels nicer. Um, there are other terminals out there outside of Mac, uh, Terminal, but get into Terminal and start talking there, right? What I hope to have out soon with DEX is that Notion-like kind of UI that you saw earlier, where it kind of gives you that file system on the left, the chat in the middle, and your files on the right to look at. And hopefully that'll come out in a few weeks time for those less technical that don't want to go in here. But yeah, just try to get comfortable with it because it's, um, it's a space I think we should all be playing in, and quite frankly, I think we should be spending probably more time in here than we do in, in the likes of Slack.

    7. AGAakash Gupta44:55

       You have been experimenting with the system that Toby Lutke

14. 44:58 – 49:02

    Pi, Open Claw, and LLM-neutral agents

    1. AGAakash Gupta44:58

       talked about, the CEO of Shopify, Pi. Should people be using this?

    2. DKDave Killeen45:02

       Pi is fascinating. I don't think people should be using it themselves, but I definitely think people building should be looking at things like Pi. What's interesting about Pi, so OpenClaw, um, is built using Pi, and essentially it's a very lightweight agent harness. So Manus got recently purchased by Meta, um, for quite a whack, and what Manus was letting people do, talk to AI in a far more effective way, but leveraging OpenAI, leveraging Claude, le- leveraging Gemini. So it had other LLMs behind it, but because of the way it orchestrated, um, its agent harness, it was giving people a far better experience in Manus than if they were to talk directly to the LLM in Gemini. Pi lets you build essentially a Manus. So for example, when you go into Pi, if you want to change, you know, how it all gets booted up, if you want to change the UI of how it looks, you can do that. So you can, you can essentially build on top of Pi, which is open source, and create essentially your own Manus. Direction is where I want to go because I want people to be able to build on DEX and through DEX without having to use Claude specifically. But I could just go to Pi and say, "Hey, look, I love the idea of session hooks or Claude code hooks. Can you just build that logic in for me, please?" And straight away, you've extended Pi, they call them extensions, uh, to be able to, um, essentially give you the capability that Claude will be giving you in Claude, but actually through Pi, where you're neutral like Switzerland in terms of LLMs. You can then let people plug into whatever LLM they want.

    3. AGAakash Gupta46:25

       What is the biggest mistake people make when they first start using Claude Code?

    4. DKDave Killeen46:29

       What's the biggest mistake they make? I guess not knowing what they want from it. I mean, well, it depends what your use case is, right? I'd be going in and just jumping in if it's your first time and just saying, "Hey, look, this is my job. This is my friction. These are my pain points. What do you think we should be doing together to make them easier?" Just flip it around, reverse prompt it, right, and ask it to come up with, you know, solutions for your pain. And start there, right? And I think you'll find it really, really interesting. And then, like, I, the other day, was like, "I want you to build or create, you know, a source to, to pull in all these YouTube transcripts for me." I didn't know how to do it, but it did. It figured it out. It's got access to search. So just tell it what you want, have a chat, use your voice, do not type, and I think you'll be off to the races in no time. Be very, very clear what your goal is, right, when you're talking to the AI. Don't be vague about what you want it to do. The kindest thing you can do to the AI is give it a very, very clear goal. If you give it that, it'll work out how to get there. Don't tell it how to get to a place. Let it figure it out itself, and it will do it in the most elegant way possible, as long as you're clear and precise and sharp, uh, with your goal. Anthropic, the developer console, by the way, have a really cool thing called Prompt Improver. Prompt Improver, integrated into DEX, is a way where you give it kind of a vague prompt, and then it turns it into a really good, precise one. And then the AI has a far better dance with it. So in DEX, what you'll do is you'll go into here, do Prompt Improver, and then give it the crappy prompt, and then it will turn it into a good one, inject that into the chat, and then you're off to the races.

    5. AGAakash Gupta47:53

       So you've been in product management for over 25 years. How have tools like Claude Code changed the role?

    6. DKDave Killeen47:59

       I mean, no disrespect to folk I've worked with over the last 25 years, but I kind of feel this way, that as a product geek, when you've got lots of ideas, you know, literally half the battle is trying to convince others of them and get the investment, in particular, to get them built. Now, that's gone. Now, you just go in and talk to Claude, and if you have the right Claude MD file where you're saying, "Make my ideas 10X. Do not accept mediocre," everything we just showed you earlier, right, then you're working with the best person you've ever worked with. No disrespect to others I've worked with in the past. Takes it up to a whole new level of brilliance. And so that's what's changed, right? That's why it comes back to your point, that we have to have that taste. We have to have a good sense of where we want to steer our dances with Claude or with AI. Um, but there has never been a better time to be a product geek. The hardest thing for us is storytelling, and now we can build these prototypes quickly, whether it's Lovable, whether it's in here or whatever, and take these out to customers, get willingness to pay data back from them, validate our assumptions as fastly, as quickly as we can, and get the buy-in from our exec to go and build. And that is just, um, hair in the arms, quite frankly. There has never, ever been a better time to be a product

15. 49:02 – 52:14

    What is overhyped vs underhyped in AI tooling

    1. DKDave Killeen49:02

       geek.

    2. AGAakash Gupta49:02

       So we're hyping it up. I have to ask you, what's over-hyped versus under-hyped in AI tooling?

    3. DKDave Killeen49:08

       I'm gonna answer in a bit of a weird way. What's hyped? Open Claw. What's under-hyped? Open Claw.

    4. AGAakash Gupta49:15

       [laughs]

    5. DKDave Killeen49:16

       Right? Literally, right? Because, you know, so everyone's going, "Oh my God, this is amazing." If you watch Alex Finn, amazing podcaster. He's hilarious. And, um, everyone will pick me up just watching him. And, you know, it's just, he's off the, the extreme of excitement and enthusiasm. He's spending tens of thousands of dollars on Mac servers and, uh, or Mac Studio, uh, I should say. And crazy, right? But at the same time, there's something in it, and I don't think, I think most of, most people in product are so busyand don't have the time to be leaning into AI, they really see it as just not that useful. And I think what we're seeing with, um, Open Claw is a fundamentally different way of, uh, of working with data, that level of persistence, um, that length of memory, and, you know, it being yours, right? Models are gonna get smaller and smaller and smaller where they'll sit on device, and we won't have to be talking to the cloud anymore. So I think we're seeing something really hap- really interesting happening with Open Claw that, um, I myself want to spend a lot more time working with, uh, because I think it's, uh, directionally fascinating in terms of what kind of business models it opens up, uh, what ways of working, um, you know, yourself that it opens up and changes. It's security-- There's an issue around security right now, but I think if you do it in the right way, um, it's fascinating. Kimi just recently, for $39 a month now, you can go to kimi.com and open up Open Claw hosted in a browser, and it's just, um, fascinating what's happening in that space, which is why obviously Sam Altman's put down allegedly a billion dollars to, uh, to Open Claw to get them on board.

    6. AGAakash Gupta50:42

       The man who predicted a one-man billion-dollar startup ended up [chuckles] buying one. So-

    7. DKDave Killeen50:48

       Cheers

    8. AGAakash Gupta50:49

       ... we have walked you guys through end-to-end what it looks like from a daily plan to knowledge scanning across the web, to PRD, to Kanban board, through to skills, MCPs, and hooks. You now have enough information. Stop watching. Start doing. Clone the repo like we just showed you. If you prefer, you can take my PM operating system. There are other resources out there. You can build your own from scratch after what you've learned. The most important thing for you to do is take a little bit of time to try out these tools. Even if your product leaders haven't given you access to these internally and you can't connect to your internal MCP tools, go build a side project. Try this out. This is not hype. This is coming from somebody with 25 years of experience. You can see how enthusiastic he is, how he has embraced the tooling. There's a lot here. Even if you're not working on AI products, if you're not working on AI features, there's a lot here. If you need a little more guidance, I have a couple more guides with Karl Veladi, with Rachel Wolin, with Caitlin Sullivan on this podcast. I have a couple guides in my newsletter. Go take out those extra resources if you need. Dave just mentioned Alex Finn. He's a great resource on YouTube and Twitter as well. Take advantage of all these content creators. Build out a system, and I guarantee you, you will find some value out of it. Until the next episode, we'll

16. 52:14 – 53:00

    Outro

    1. AGAakash Gupta52:14

       see you later. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you could take a moment to double-check that you have followed on Apple and Spotify podcasts, subscribed on YouTube, left a rating or review on Apple or Spotify, and commented on YouTube, all these things will help the algorithm distribute the show to more and more people. As we distribute the show to more people, we can grow the show, improve the quality of the content and the production to get you better insights to stay ahead in your career. Finally, do check out my bundle at bundle.aakashg.com to get access to nine AI products for an entire year for free. This includes Dovetail, Mobbin, Linear, Reforge Build, Descript, and many other amazing tools that will help you as an AI product manager or builder succeed. I'll see you in the next episode.

Episode duration: 53:10