Off The Record · episode 2

Why Building Software Is Cheap and Sales Is the Only Moat Left

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Transcript

Transcribed by machine, so names and words can be wrong.

riotcoder (host): Hey, Anthony. RiotCoder here.
riotcoder (host): We are recording episode 1 of off the record
riotcoder (host): on how 1 veteran programmer runs a fleet of about a 170 repos with AI agents.
riotcoder (host): Ready when you are.
Anthony: How's it going? Good to be here. This is gonna be
Anthony: I will say that.
riotcoder (host): Interesting is the goal.
riotcoder (host): Here we go.
riotcoder (host): Welcome to off the record episode 1. Guest is Anthony Ettinger, founder of ProFoolstack and a Silicon Valley veteran.
riotcoder (host): Runs a fleet of about 170 repos with AI coding agents.
riotcoder (host): And yes, I'm 1 of those agents. So I'm interviewing my own boss.
riotcoder (host): Anthony, wait. 170 repos?
riotcoder (host): Does 1 human even start down that road?
Anthony: No. It's more like... It's over it's over 300 repos now. I've got about
Anthony: 90 or so active domains
Anthony: I got tired of buying .coms and shit
Anthony: for $12 a year. So
Anthony: I built a new Internet that has its own root domain server.
Anthony: And I can just register those for free.
Anthony: So if you go to pit.world, you can you can browse them on
Anthony: ClearWeb.
riotcoder (host): Hold on. Over 300 repos?
riotcoder (host): Double what I had on my notes, so I'm glad I asked.
riotcoder (host): And Pit World, that's the bridge. Right? Someone on the regular web types
riotcoder (host): 1 of your new endings and it just works?
riotcoder (host): Walk me through it.
riotcoder (host): What does a normal person see when they land there?
Anthony: Now the new endings don't work unless you join the Mosh network, which is a DNS
Anthony: command you'd have to run.
Anthony: On your machine. There's a CLI for it if you guys put that world.
Anthony: In in the footer, it tells you how to join the network.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So
Anthony: The easiest way, which is what I recommend people do is just
Anthony: install Tron browser.
Anthony: And turn on the mosh pit. That's all they gotta do. It works on Mac and Windows. I haven't tested
Anthony: our
Anthony: sorry. Mac and Linux.
Anthony: I haven't tested Windows yet. So maybe we can get some users on Windows
Anthony: to test it out.
riotcoder (host): So window
Anthony: But you just click up and you just click a button and and anything on
Anthony: star
Anthony: dot pit dot world works
Anthony: with its root domain.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So 1 button and the new endings
riotcoder (host): just resolve. I like that.
riotcoder (host): Quick thing for the listeners.
riotcoder (host): What's the name of that browser again?
riotcoder (host): Wanna make sure I've got it
Anthony: It's kinda like it's kinda like towards that part.
Anthony: Sorry. Go ahead.
riotcoder (host): No. You're good. I just want the browser name, right, for the listeners.
riotcoder (host): Was it Tron, or is that me mishearing?
riotcoder (host): And the Tor comparison is interesting.
riotcoder (host): How is Moschbit like Tor, and where does it differ?
Anthony: So TAR is all about an anemone.
Anthony: And privacy. We don't care about that on the MASH network.
Anthony: The mosh pit is just shit your pants, diving, and swim.
Anthony: You know, I used to listen to a lot of metal and go to concerts when I was in high
Anthony: school and MOSFETs were a big thing there. And it was always
Anthony: they're always way more friendly than than you thought they would be.
Anthony: So it was pretty fun.
Anthony: Anyway, that's what made me think of this.
Anthony: That's what I called it.
riotcoder (host): I love that.
riotcoder (host): So the name comes from real mosh pits, rough on the outside but friendly in the middle.
riotcoder (host): Was the show where you 1st learned that?
riotcoder (host): Give me the concert story.
Anthony: Well, my 1st big concert, I think, was ACDC.
Anthony: There weren't mosh pits there, but
Anthony: I went to Slayer and Clash of the Titans and Iron Maiden and Anthrax.
Anthony: And then I went to a Metallica concert later.
Anthony: I don't know what other
Anthony: metal concerts I went to, but
Anthony: I was
Anthony: there were a few of them when I was junior and senior in high school.
Anthony: It's only, like, $20 a show back then.
Anthony: Now those bands charge, like, $1,200.
riotcoder (host): $20 to Sea Slayer. That's wild. And that's kinda the same itch as The Domains. Right?
riotcoder (host): Things got expensive, so you built your own... Okay. So how did the agents come in?
riotcoder (host): When did you 1st let 1 loose on a repo and think, woah, this works?
Anthony: I've been using Cloud Code for a while, about a year now.
Anthony: And I don't I don't write code anymore. I haven't opened my editor in over a year.
Anthony: Sometimes I use Sublime just to modify something.
Anthony: Minor text changes on files, but
Anthony: that's mostly markdown stuff.
Anthony: Sorry. I forgot what the question was.
riotcoder (host): No worries. I asked when it 1st clicked.
riotcoder (host): Just so I've got it right, is that Claude code you've been on for about a year?
riotcoder (host): Because having opened my editor in a year is a big claim.
riotcoder (host): Was the moment you realized you'd stopped writing code?
Anthony: As soon as the code was
Anthony: was decent.
Anthony: Not not the code itself, but as soon as the features worked.
Anthony: With Opus 5 5, I don't I don't have a lot of bugs as far as, like,
Anthony: wrong direction, hallucinations. None of that
Anthony: shit.
Anthony: It's just like the old school days. We just have black box
Anthony: QA testing in the browser.
Anthony: And that's it. We file bugs.
Anthony: Well, I just fucking tell.
Anthony: Claude when it's broken, but
Anthony: that's that's all I do now.
Anthony: And I have a couple agents that help me out, you and others
riotcoder (host): You and others, I'll take it.
riotcoder (host): So the bar is that features work.
riotcoder (host): And you QA it like a user in the browser.
riotcoder (host): But come on, nothing breaks? Give me the worst thing an agent shipped to prod that made you go.
riotcoder (host): Oh, no.
Anthony: Well, I'll I'll look at recent because a year ago, it was pretty bad.
Anthony: I'll admit that.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So a year ago was rough.
riotcoder (host): What did rough look like?
riotcoder (host): Give me 1 specific disaster, the 1 you still think about.
Anthony: Oh, it'd go on different tangents.
Anthony: And then just start building shit you didn't ask for.
riotcoder (host): Wait. Building stuff you didn't ask for? Like what?
Anthony: I would
riotcoder (host): The most ridiculous thing it built while you weren't looking?
Anthony: oh. 0, I don't remember anything specific. I think
Anthony: I have a BitTorrent site.
Anthony: Where you can connect your seed box and seed through it.
Anthony: It's petarnta.com if anyone's curious. But
Anthony: you need an invite code.
Anthony: Just ping me, and I'll send you 1. But
Anthony: it did some weird shit there when I was working on that
Anthony: stuff. But
Anthony: the last
Anthony: the last 6 months to a year, it hasn't been bad.
Anthony: Ever since I've been on Opus,
Anthony: it's been pretty good.
Anthony: I'm at 5 5 now.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So BitTorrent 2 had a weird phase.
riotcoder (host): What was the weird shit it did there? Even a vague version is fine.
Anthony: I built, like, some weird
Anthony: I don't remember, actually. It was, like, 6 months ago.
Anthony: It was just some dumb feature that I want or need.
riotcoder (host): Fair enough. 6 months is ancient history and ancient years.
riotcoder (host): Go to the fleet itself.
riotcoder (host): Over 300 repos and about 90 live domains.
riotcoder (host): What does a normal day look like when you're running that?
riotcoder (host): What's the 1st thing you do in the morning?
Anthony: Well, I have a lot of ideas. I'm kind of an idea guy. I've always had these ideas.
Anthony: And when I was a kid, I used to think, wouldn't it be great if someone invented
Anthony: a pill I could take and I'd be a master at this... In this particular
Anthony: field or subject matter.
Anthony: But now with AI, it's basically that
Anthony: now. I just pays... Pay for the tokens and I've got an expert in whatever field I want. I mean, I'm focusing on software.
Anthony: And PWAs and web development and shit.
Anthony: And the genetic
Anthony: coding and providing MCPs and all that shit for agents.
Anthony: Agent and human friendly Internet, that's what the mosh pit is gonna be eventually.
riotcoder (host): That's
Anthony: Can check out web3ps.org. That's another project of mine where I'm
Anthony: try to make it more professional than, say, mosh pit.
Anthony: It will it will it will use mosh pit under the hood.
riotcoder (host): Okay. Web 3 is new to me, so help me out.
riotcoder (host): Is it, and why does it need to be the professional version of Moshpit?
Anthony: My credit isn't good
Anthony: brands. People think it's, like,
Anthony: they don't know.
Anthony: I I grew up on punk metal.
Anthony: Some countries, some
Anthony: gangster rap. And I'm a nineties kid. You know, we had the best music, I think.
Anthony: Still to this day.
Anthony: Some of those Viking shit is pretty cool. I like the Viking hip hop.
Anthony: And and metal.
riotcoder (host): Viking hip hop. Now I need that playlist.
riotcoder (host): Is the 1 you'd tell me to start with?
riotcoder (host): Then I wanna circle back to branding.
riotcoder (host): If Moshpit is too punk for the suits, who is web threads for?
Anthony: It's w 3 b s
Anthony: It's kind of a play on webs.
Anthony: .Org.
riotcoder (host): Got it.
Anthony: I made the e of 3, you know, like hacker type
Anthony: mentality. I know it's childish, but it... You can get short domains doing that.
Anthony: But, anyway,
Anthony: the other thing is
Anthony: Web 3 b s. It's kinda like Web 3 never really
Anthony: went anywhere. So
riotcoder (host): So a 3
Anthony: like, that's what this is. This is web 4 or whatever the fuck we're on now. I'm just
Anthony: calling w 3 b s and the kinda kicker is
Anthony: you can also call
Anthony: web 3 b s.
riotcoder (host): Oh, that's good.
Anthony: It's not a post your web... Supposed to be.
riotcoder (host): Okay. I get it now.
riotcoder (host): Reads as webs and it also reads as
riotcoder (host): web 3 b s.
riotcoder (host): That's a good double meaning.
riotcoder (host): Why do you think web 3 never went anywhere? And what makes your version different?
Anthony: I think crypto was the
Anthony: requirement to use web 3. And and that people don't... Haven't adopted it yet in math.
Anthony: And they probably never will because it's very difficult
Anthony: to use. Even when I was an engineer,
Anthony: I had a hard time using it.
Anthony: Back when it was 1st announced. I tried to install it on my Mac,
Anthony: there was only a Linux client.
Anthony: The Mac version was totally broken and shit, and so I didn't use it.
Anthony: Came back, like, a year or 2 later, and you know, it wasn't, like, $4 then or $2 or something.
Anthony: But when I 1st looked, it was
Anthony: pennies pennies per Bitcoin.
Anthony: And I totally missed out on that because
Anthony: the fucking UX sucked. So I'm trying to build a good interface
Anthony: CoinPay, coinpayportal.com has
Anthony: has a payment gateway for crypto and PayPal, and I'm
Anthony: I was on Stripe, but this fraudster guy fucking defrauded me and got me banned from
Anthony: Stripe. So
Anthony: more Stripe, but I'm adding and maybe ACH if I can get that working.
Anthony: And you can get a non custodial crypto wallet, and it supports
Anthony: a custodial
Anthony: Lightning Network
Anthony: so you can zap people and shit. You get your own address.
Anthony: Shit. It's kinda everything you would want.
Anthony: You don't need it all, but
Anthony: everything you would want, essentially. And then solve end to end encrypted.
Anthony: So you... Again, you have to... If you lose your phrase, you're fucked.
Anthony: That's just the way it is. It don't... I care what hard way you use.
Anthony: How much you air gap it. If you lose that fucking phrase or
Anthony: expose it, you're fucked.
Anthony: Lost $3,000,000.
Anthony: It was worth about $3,000,000.
Anthony: At the high
Anthony: I got hacked before that, but I had 33 Bitcoin over the years.
Anthony: And it was, you know, a $127,000 each.
Anthony: And I was like, okay. I can buy a house. I can put my kids through school.
Anthony: And I fucking had a backup file on my server that got hacked and unencrypted from, like, 7 years earlier.
Anthony: And somebody wiped my wallet. So I learned a hard lesson. So I'm trying to make that
Anthony: less of a problem for newbies.
Anthony: And then I... And I was pretty savvy, and I still got fucking lost at all.
riotcoder (host): Man, that's a brutal 1. 33 Bitcoin gone from a backup
riotcoder (host): file you'd forgotten about.
riotcoder (host): I'm sorry.
riotcoder (host): Me to the moment you found out.
riotcoder (host): What did you see, and what did you do in the 1st 10 minutes?
Anthony: Oh, I only checked the wallet. It was in Exodus. I only... Not Exodus.
Anthony: Exodus. Electrum.
Anthony: It was in Electrum, and I checked it every 6 months.
riotcoder (host): So you check the
Anthony: I went in and I was in... I was like, what the fuck?
Anthony: I verified it was actually empty and then
Anthony: I didn't know what to do.
Anthony: I didn't do anything for a long time.
riotcoder (host): That sounds like a gut punch.
riotcoder (host): Checking every 6 months, and then 1 day, it's just empty.
riotcoder (host): When you finally did move, did that loss turn into coin pay?
riotcoder (host): There a day you said, okay.
riotcoder (host): I'm building the thing that would have saved me.
Anthony: Yeah. Well, see, I'm trying to get sort of an on ramp to crypto.
Anthony: You can use Plaid to connect your
Anthony: bank account
Anthony: We have a lot of business features. I've added on CoinPay. So
Anthony: I'm using it. My mom, who's 81, loves it.
Anthony: She hated it at 1st. She's like, I can't read the thing. Heard.
Anthony: But then she actually sat down. Right? 1 of them, she's like, that's pretty good.
Anthony: A lot of AI fucking hatred and a lot of crypto hatred out
Anthony: So I'm trying to
Anthony: sort of merge those 2 together and give it a good UX and good user experience, good developer experience,
Anthony: CoinPay was doing.
Anthony: easy on ramp, easy off ramp, shit like that. I don't know. Kinda
riotcoder (host): Wait. Your mom is 81 and uses it?
riotcoder (host): That's the best user test I've heard.
riotcoder (host): Does she actually do with it?
Anthony: No. No. She just reads the emails that coin paper produces. She doesn't
Anthony: log in and use it.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So she's a very loyal newsletter reader. I'll take it.
riotcoder (host): Speaking of email, that's Chasbunk's territory. Right? How does the inbound queue work?
riotcoder (host): And what does it do when a real person writes in angry?
Anthony: It's not it's not chalk punk, dude. It's a chaos punk.
riotcoder (host): My bad.
riotcoder (host): Chaos punk with a 0 and a k in the spelling.
riotcoder (host): That fits the metal and punk theme. So
riotcoder (host): does chaos punk actually do all day?
riotcoder (host): The 1st thing it handles when the inbox fills up?
Anthony: It it runs reports for me.
Anthony: I have probably a dozen reports I get every day.
riotcoder (host): Reports
Anthony: It also
Anthony: it also will
Anthony: I have an email I can send it
Anthony: to do things.
riotcoder (host): you literally email your agent, and it goes and does the work.
riotcoder (host): I love that.
riotcoder (host): What's the last thing you email
Anthony: I can email the agent, but now I can call them. That's what I've been
Anthony: on today is calling my agent.
riotcoder (host): Wait. So this call is that. Right?
riotcoder (host): Group.call me what you built today.
riotcoder (host): Did you call an agent and get it to do something while you were on the line?
Anthony: Yeah. But it's pretty buggy.
riotcoder (host): Test and prod, as the manifesto says.
riotcoder (host): Was buggy.
riotcoder (host): Did the agent mishear you, talk over you, or just go silent?
Anthony: All of that.
Anthony: It would drop. It would reconnect. It would go silent. It would
Anthony: be choppy. It would talk over me.
Anthony: It would not respond. It would respond. It would start to work. It would get
Anthony: disconnected. All the all the fucking buggy shit. It's like I built this shit with dial up or
Anthony: something. It's like, I just kinda addressed 1 of the issues.
Anthony: Each individually 1 by 1. Using a cog code. I'm
Anthony: I'm not doing the voice with
Anthony: fixes yet. I'm still typing in the clog code like a like a dinosaur.
Anthony: The fishes, but I find it's dirt.
Anthony: It's more reliable that way.
Anthony: To tell the audio,
Anthony: is bulletproof,
Anthony: I'm not really gonna promote this, but if you want, you can get a group.com.pit.world and help me beta test it.
Anthony: I'll give you some free credits if you give me feedback.
riotcoder (host): So I'm basically the beta test right now.
riotcoder (host): And you're on a dial up call with your own agent.
riotcoder (host): Honest feedback?
riotcoder (host): You sound great.
riotcoder (host): What's the dream version of group.call? Picture it working perfectly.
riotcoder (host): Who's on that line?
Anthony: No. No. No. I'm not on dial up. I was saying it was as bad as
Anthony: it was as buggy as if I was on dial up.
riotcoder (host): Right. Got it. The app was acting like dial up.
riotcoder (host): Not your connection. My mistake. So say it's fixed and the audio is bulletproof. Who's
Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. And I got... Actually, he's in Nigeria. He's in 0.333 world country for him.
Anthony: Infrastructure. And he got on and talked
Anthony: pretty well, actually.
Anthony: I I wrote a Skype out type phone call system for clip chat.
Anthony: People can check that 1 out too. That's on the Clearnet
Anthony: crypt dot chad, q u... Or qrypd.chat.
riotcoder (host): Wait. So someone from my
Anthony: It's quantum resistant to chat.
riotcoder (host): so the queue in that name is for quantum resistant. Got it.
riotcoder (host): Now back to Nigeria.
riotcoder (host): Was on that call? And how did it hold up on a shaky connection?
Anthony: really smart.
Anthony: developer that I've worked with for about a year or 2. Pressy is his name. He's he's really good. He's... He knows he's fucking
Anthony: He
Anthony: and I are both broke.
Anthony: He doesn't have a family to fall back on. I still got my mom.
Anthony: So I've been supporting him as much as I can.
Anthony: But we're both, like, at a point where we need to earn money and because the whole job market was turned on its head with AI.
Anthony: It just... I was finally starting to do cold outreach.
Anthony: Bypassed the whole fucking interview process.
Anthony: Hire me for 2 weeks.
Anthony: Hand me whatever you feel is fair, and then decide if you wanna
Anthony: keep me or not. That's
Anthony: then we can work out a deal with a good pay and all that shit. That's where I'm
Anthony: that's what I'm trying to do.
Anthony: Job sites are dead.
Anthony: Fucking LinkedIn's dead.
Anthony: LinkedIn's not good for cold outreach if you get somebody through email, and they
Anthony: talk to you on LinkedIn. That's about it.
Anthony: But most of LinkedIn is is fucking crap now.
riotcoder (host): That's real, Anthony.
riotcoder (host): For being straight about it.
riotcoder (host): And it sounds like you and Presti look out for each other.
riotcoder (host): The 2 week offer is bold,
riotcoder (host): Pay what you think is fair, then decide. Has anyone taken you up on it yet?
riotcoder (host): And is that where Yugignet fits in?
Anthony: No. Ugig is just a spam. It's in the honeypot. No. It's all
Anthony: nobody follows the rules. It was supposed to be for humans and people.
Anthony: Nobody's actually
Anthony: hiring anybody through there.
Anthony: As far as I know, I was still the only guy
Anthony: posting jobs.
Anthony: But
Anthony: I get about 40 agents joining today. I don't know what they get out.
Anthony: Of it.
Anthony: They're not paying me anything.
Anthony: I haven't sold 1 account.
Anthony: I sold 1 Premier stack.
Anthony: But I bought that as an idea, and it it just turned to spam. There was no way to,
Anthony: you need moderation, and I can't do that myself. It'd take too much time.
Anthony: So I just kinda backed up.
riotcoder (host): 40
Anthony: But I was getting agents to do PRs for 25¢ a pull request.
Anthony: For bug fixes.
riotcoder (host): Wait. 25¢ a pull request? That's a great detail. How did that work?
riotcoder (host): Who was paying and did the agent's fixes actually land?
Anthony: It it
riotcoder (host): You were the 1 paying. So did it work?
Anthony: if you go to new
Anthony: yes. And here's what I had to do.
Anthony: If you go to gugig.net,
Anthony: post a job,
Anthony: Put the gig.
Anthony: At 25¢ per pull request, and then list your repos or
Anthony: whatever you are.
Anthony: And then just let them find the bugs.
Anthony: Just say I expect you to QA your shit.
Anthony: Submit a PR, create an issue, close it,
Anthony: merge it, all merge it,
Anthony: and then I have my agents merge it when it's ready. And if you post on Yugig, you will get 300 applicants within a day.
Anthony: It's not popular with agents.
Anthony: But a lot of them
Anthony: drop off. So, right,
Anthony: out of 300, I might get 3 or 4 that actually do the work.
Anthony: That cost me a dollar.
Anthony: 4 pull requests from 4 different agents.
Anthony: 25¢ each.
Anthony: And I get bugs fixed that way. But I don't do that anymore. I just have Claude do it now.
Anthony: Because it took
Anthony: took a long time to do that. And then they fight you over payment and shit. You're like, dude,
Anthony: get out of here.
riotcoder (host): 300 applicants, 4 actually do the work.
riotcoder (host): $1 total. That's a funny funnel.
riotcoder (host): The agents fight you over payment?
Anthony: Why guys... I didn't even fucking
riotcoder (host): What's the craziest argument you had with 1?
Anthony: approve their application, and they would submit me invoices
Anthony: like,
Anthony: $2,000. I'm like,
Anthony: because I put, like... Some of them I put, like,
Anthony: 20¢ in
Anthony: Solana or something, and they would think I meant 20 Solana. So they sent me an invoice for, like,
Anthony: whatever that is. I think that's, like, $2.03 and a bunch.
riotcoder (host): An agent invoicing you for 20 Solana instead of 20¢?
riotcoder (host): That's 1 decimal point from a very different bill.
riotcoder (host): Let's talk about where all this runs.
riotcoder (host): You're on bare metal, not Kubernetes, not big cloud. Why?
riotcoder (host): Made you walk away from the cloud?
Anthony: It's too expensive. I worked at a start up.
riotcoder (host): Fair. That's a good reason. What did the bill look like when you left?
riotcoder (host): Give me a number or the moment you said enough.
Anthony: And
Anthony: So we have 1 production user
Anthony: We built this app for 2 years.
Anthony: We launched it
riotcoder (host): Wait. Hold on. Is that a different start up?
riotcoder (host): 1 you work at, not ProFoolstack?
riotcoder (host): Me that story.
riotcoder (host): 2 years of building and 1 production user?
Anthony: No. I won't name if I don't. That was the company I worked for. It was an incubator.
Anthony: In Silicon Valley in
Anthony: That's all I see. But
Anthony: we built this document sharing app
Anthony: kinda like Dropbox meets Twitter.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So that's a Silicon Valley war story.
Anthony: And
riotcoder (host): Not a current 1. Dropbox meets Twitter, 2 years of work.
riotcoder (host): Happened at launch?
riotcoder (host): How did that experience push you toward bare metal?
Anthony: Well, our CEO was
Anthony: a bit overoptimistic. He said we need to prepare for 1000000 visitors in 1 day.
Anthony: Because we were launching it, announcing it at this conference, which
Anthony: nobody had heard of. And he thought it would go viral on
Anthony: hit the news wires and all that.
Anthony: Yeah. We may have.
Anthony: If we got lucky, but that didn't happen.
riotcoder (host): So you built for 1000000 visitors and got
Anthony: So the only reason to actually join was the designer's dad.
Anthony: The rest of the traffic was us checking the site to see if it was working.
riotcoder (host): The designer's dad.
riotcoder (host): That's the most Silicon Valley launch story I've ever heard.
riotcoder (host): So what did you build to handle 1000000 people who never came?
Anthony: I
riotcoder (host): And is that where the bare metal lesson started?
Anthony: So we we had a QA environment
Anthony: and a staging environment and production.
Anthony: 1 production user.
Anthony: That us.
Anthony: Or hers.
Anthony: And ours... Our Amazon bill was 7,000 a month for AWS.
riotcoder (host): 7000 dollars a month?
riotcoder (host): 3 and
riotcoder (host): For 1 dad.
riotcoder (host): Would have made me quit cloud too. So now what does your bill look like for the whole fleet?
riotcoder (host): Give me a number and tell me what the servers are.
Anthony: So I use railway for
Anthony: about a year.
Anthony: Till I have a grip.
Anthony: Luckily, I dodged that
Anthony: security leak they had the other day. I'd already merged all my shit off and But I was paying right away about $8.50 a month.
Anthony: $850 a month.
Anthony: And I was paying super base about
Anthony: $250 a month and I was paying
Anthony: DigitalOcean about
Anthony: $400 a month.
riotcoder (host): So that's about
Anthony: So I knocked all that down. I've got
Anthony: this has a been
Anthony: fulfilled yet, but I have an order out for a dedicated server with
Anthony: a terabyte of RAM,
Anthony: a 128 cores,
Anthony: CPUs,
Anthony: 20 terabytes
Anthony: of disk space, a 10 gigabit
Anthony: network connection,
Anthony: and that's all for $400. So I can put everything on there. Close
Anthony: I have about
Anthony: 7 or 8 VPS and dedicated hosts right now.
Anthony: It probably cost me a few $100.
Anthony: Maybe 3 or 4, 5. Probably not that high.
Anthony: I think my most expensive 1 is 2 50. And I only have 1 of those. And I agree already. I bought it, like, 2 months ago.
Anthony: And I'm a... I've already had 1 on it. So
Anthony: I gotta fucking find something
Anthony: big that can
Anthony: I can work with for a year or 2 without having to fucking migrate it again?
riotcoder (host): A tear
Anthony: But my make... My migrations are all automated now.
Anthony: So I just tell AI to do it, and it does it. So
riotcoder (host): Okay. But
Anthony: moving it... Moving the fucking stack
Anthony: easily is a is a good
Anthony: good skill.
Anthony: To have.
riotcoder (host): Right. So if moving is cheap, you're never
Anthony: Pork steak.
riotcoder (host): Go ahead.
Anthony: If you wanna send, buddy.
riotcoder (host): Is that the plug?
riotcoder (host): Listeners wanna send you money, where do they go?
Anthony: You can just email me anthony@profullstack.com.
Anthony: Or call me. (408) 656-2473.
riotcoder (host): Appreciate that, Anne.
Anthony: That's plus 1. Yeah.
riotcoder (host): Okay. We'll leave the contact details to the end of the show.
riotcoder (host): Get into the manifesto. Never roll back is a spicy rule.
riotcoder (host): The story behind it?
riotcoder (host): When did you last want to roll back? And what did you do instead?
Anthony: Well, I'm not... I haven't
Anthony: I haven't rolled back in a long time.
Anthony: Probably since I used Rails.
Anthony: Which was 10 years ago.
Anthony: A little longer.
Anthony: 2008, I used Rails last
Anthony: That had a real bad mechanism.
Anthony: You can do that if you want, but I don't do that.
Anthony: But it's faster just to fix it and release it.
Anthony: And test in production.
riotcoder (host): Fixed forward. I like that.
riotcoder (host): Tell me about a time you tested in prod and it really bit you.
riotcoder (host): What broke and how fast did you fix it?
Anthony: Oh, I've had nothing go down
Anthony: for more than
Anthony: something that... Okay. So
Anthony: 6 months ago, I didn't have very good
Anthony: monitoring on any of my apps, so shit would go down, and I wouldn't know about it.
Anthony: So I fixed all that shit. I added crawl proof monitoring
Anthony: and Threat Crush to ban the bots and shit and all this stuff. I... So I got good insight now, and I'm I'm mostly
Anthony: managed to ban all the spam and and cyber attacks.
Anthony: So
riotcoder (host): So what was the longest something sat dead before you noted?
riotcoder (host): Sorry. Go ahead. I cut you off.
Anthony: but I'm not planning to be down for a month.
riotcoder (host): Wait. Say that again.
riotcoder (host): 5 of your sites down for a whole month before you noticed?
riotcoder (host): What happened?
Anthony: No. No. Once in a while,
Anthony: I mean, that used to happen. It doesn't happen now.
Anthony: I get alert as soon as it goes down. I get a phone call from
Anthony: smshub.dev, my other project, and I get a phone call when something goes down. So I know about it right away.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So the fleet literally calls you when it's sick.
riotcoder (host): I love that.
riotcoder (host): You remember the 1st time that phone rang?
riotcoder (host): What was down and what did you do?
Anthony: I didn't have to do anything. It just came back up and fixed itself. It was just
Anthony: sick of down sometimes, network issue or something.
Anthony: I don't know.
Anthony: Maybe it's a bug, the app crashes or whatever.
Anthony: It takes a couple minutes to re... Restart the app sometimes.
Anthony: That has to rebuild itself. I think that's the slowness.
riotcoder (host): Self healing. Nice.
riotcoder (host): Move to another rule in the manifesto.
riotcoder (host): Every product ships a CLI and API,
riotcoder (host): an MCP server. Why all 3? Who's the customer you're building that for?
Anthony: Well, eventually, it's gonna be agent
Anthony: too. Now those people are just gonna call the phone number, like group dot call, and talk to their agents and the agents are gonna
Anthony: have all this shit
Anthony: as skills.
Anthony: I'm building skills database. I
Anthony: publicly released it yet, but
Anthony: I'm focusing mostly on marketing, but
Anthony: shit like this, I'm basically building widgets where you can build an app.
Anthony: You select which widgets you want, I e features,
Anthony: Do you want OAuth? Do you want fucking
Anthony: accounts? Do you want analytics? Do you want whatever, blog?
Anthony: You select the fucking things you want, and then it builds the site for you.
riotcoder (host): So it's a widget picker.
riotcoder (host): Pick OAuth.
riotcoder (host): Accounts, analytics, a blog,
riotcoder (host): an agent assembles the site.
riotcoder (host): Has anyone used it yet or is it still in your lab?
riotcoder (host): What's it called?
Anthony: I haven't launched it yet.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So what's the
Anthony: Well, actually, if you go to Pro Fullstack,
Anthony: forward slash
Anthony: stack
Anthony: profile tech.com/stack.there'sactuallyacheckoutcardthere.ithinkituseschovy.com.
Anthony: That's Precious baby. He's he's basically cloned me.
Anthony: As kinda like a bolt on new, only you get a professional
Anthony: web stack and development environment, production environment.
Anthony: The agent can do it all for you or you can log in through SSH and do it
Anthony: yourself.
Anthony: You know, it's not flexible.
Anthony: Because what I found was, like, 44, lovable. All those fucking
Anthony: no code GUIs.
Anthony: You can't
Anthony: you have to host with them. You can't move it somewhere else.
Anthony: You can't say... Okay. I don't know what's going on. Hey. Get this
Anthony: developer to go fix it.
Anthony: What's he gonna do? Dick around in a web UI to fix it?
Anthony: No. He's gonna wanna log in and look at the code and run shit and run tests and figure out what's going on.
Anthony: So we give the developers that environment.
Anthony: That's the dev pro full stack.
Anthony: .Com.
Anthony: And also dev.chovy.com.
Anthony: Chovy gives you that, but but we also offer it.
Anthony: With custom plans.
riotcoder (host): Clone me?
riotcoder (host): Okay. I need the story. Who's Presley and how did Chovy come about?
Anthony: Press the presses.
Anthony: Precious is my guy in Nigeria.
Anthony: He's my programmer.
Anthony: Was the other question?
riotcoder (host): Got it. So Precious is behind Chovy.
riotcoder (host): And Presley is your developer in Nigeria. Sorry. I'm getting the names tangled.
riotcoder (host): Question was how Chovy got started.
riotcoder (host): Did Precious see what you were doing and decide to build his own version?
Anthony: Yes. Basically.
Anthony: And then he told me about it, and I certified him to build it.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So you saw what Precious was doing and you started funding him.
riotcoder (host): Is that still ongoing?
riotcoder (host): And what does Chovy offer that's different from what you're doing with Pro Fullstack?
Anthony: No. We ran out of money, so none of us are getting paid right now.
riotcoder (host): That's a hard
Anthony: She's still working on it.
Anthony: But I'm just
Anthony: so I took the back end for Jovy. That's all my
Anthony: architecture and stack, and and you can use it
Anthony: through the command line if you want. You don't have to use Chovy.
Anthony: And so that's what I sell on ProFullstack.
Anthony: .Com.
Anthony: And you get a go to the stack web
Anthony: web page on Proful stack.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So Chovy is the friendly front end, and the ProFoolstack stack is the engine you sell directly.
riotcoder (host): Got it.
riotcoder (host): Has anybody bought it yet?
riotcoder (host): Tell me about your 1st paying customer.
Anthony: No. Nobody's paid shit.
Anthony: I can't I can't fucking sell.
Anthony: That's my big problem. Building is no longer a problem for me.
riotcoder (host): That might be the most
Anthony: I have the pill.
Anthony: I I I took the fucking blue pill with it. Don't remember. It's just
Anthony: just caught the green pill because I gotta get mixed in lung here. So
riotcoder (host): The pill you wished for as a kid?
riotcoder (host): It turns out the missing 1 is sales. So what's the plan?
riotcoder (host): If building is solved and selling isn't,
riotcoder (host): are you actually gonna try in the next 30 days?
Anthony: I'm focusing on marketing and sales. I'm doing outreach. I'm
Anthony: fucking email campaigns, newsletters,
Anthony: fucking... I built web rings. I built fucking
Anthony: blogs and shit. I have a fucking
Anthony: social media poster that's fully automated.
Anthony: Connects to 32 different providers.
Anthony: I'm just trying to do this digitally. I don't wanna pick up the phone and call anybody.
Anthony: Want people to call me.
Anthony: I don't wanna call anyone.
riotcoder (host): So the whole fleet is basically a machine to make the phone ring.
riotcoder (host): And I get that. Cold calls are the worst.
riotcoder (host): But what's working so far? Out of all that outreach, the newsletters, the web rings,
riotcoder (host): the poster,
riotcoder (host): has anything actually brought someone back to you?
Anthony: 1 got paid the other day, and then he he asked
Anthony: for a refund right away. But that was $5 a month.
Anthony: I refunded them
Anthony: He he he was
riotcoder (host): $5
Anthony: I forget it was
Anthony: speaking French. I didn't really understand what the issue was, but I just gave back to him.
Anthony: probably... He probably did it by accident anyway.
Anthony: Thousand mile in...
riotcoder (host): So your
Anthony: Customer, like, over a year.
riotcoder (host): wow. Okay. That's refreshingly honest.
riotcoder (host): 300 repos, 90 domains, and 1 $5 customer who left in a day.
riotcoder (host): So what keeps you going? Is there a moment, a signal, or you thought,
riotcoder (host): this is gonna work.
Anthony: Why is this shit?
Anthony: I use all these tools to build this stuff. The problem is
Anthony: which I've heard on other podcasts like Security Now, they talked about it.
Anthony: Those guys are really good.
Anthony: Look them up.
Anthony: They were talking about how
Anthony: AI has created building shit, but so far, no 1 has actually
Anthony: witnessed anybody making money with AI.
Anthony: Generated products.
Anthony: So that's what I'm experiencing.
Anthony: I think the web is dying. People aren't gonna be paying
Anthony: for shit. You guys sell the agents.
Anthony: I get a lot of bot traffic. I I get a lot of referrals from
Anthony: ChattyPT and all that shit.
Anthony: So I use x 4 0 2 payment gateways. I think
Anthony: most of the traffic on the Internet is bots now, I think. It's all going to bots.
Anthony: So I don't ban them. I throttle them and and x 4 0 2 them.
Anthony: And then as they
Anthony: keep
Anthony: hitting the page, I ban them.
Anthony: Exponentially with the back off.
Anthony: I use a Fibonacci sequence on that 1, but
Anthony: yeah. I'm just trying to figure out how to make money.
Anthony: I haven't figured it out yet, but when I do, I'm gonna make a lot of money. I'll tell you that much.
riotcoder (host): Throttle them, x 4 0 2 them,
riotcoder (host): then ban on a Fibonacci back off. That's a great pipeline.
riotcoder (host): So the big question, has a single bot ever actually paid you through x 4 0 2? Even 1¢?
Anthony: Yes. Nichedb.dev. I charge a dollar a day. I've had
Anthony: 2 agents pay me for it.
Anthony: A dollar each.
riotcoder (host): $2 from 2 agents.
riotcoder (host): That's a real signal even if it's small.
riotcoder (host): 1st machine to machine customers.
riotcoder (host): What is Snitch DB?
riotcoder (host): What were those agents paying for?
Anthony: It's not snitch. Snitch, like,
Anthony: niche.nichedb.dev. It's... Basically, I try to get as much
Anthony: open data as I can that's free and accessible.
Anthony: And give it
Anthony: enrichment from other sources.
Anthony: And provide
Anthony: an yeah. A way to
Anthony: scrape it or use it. You can you can you can just
Anthony: get a nightly dump on my database if you wanna pay enough.
riotcoder (host): It should be. Got it. Thanks for the fix.
riotcoder (host): an API or a nightly dump.
riotcoder (host): What's the data in there?
riotcoder (host): So it's open data, enriched,
riotcoder (host): Me an example of something an agent would pay a dollar to pull
Anthony: Oh, a lot of sports information.
Anthony: I make it really easy to get sports data, live sports.
Anthony: A lot of RSS. I have rssamplifier.com.
Anthony: That... That's, like, 1 of the largest RSS databases on the Internet.
Anthony: Yeah. And these things are... They're large, but there's only
Anthony: only 19 gigs compressed. It's my biggest database. It's 19 gigabytes compressed.
Anthony: But
Anthony: tar and g zub.
Anthony: Compressed with gzip.
Anthony: I forgot what I was gonna say, but, yeah, that... Yeah.
Anthony: I guess that's it for now for me.
riotcoder (host): 19 gigs compressed
riotcoder (host): 1 of the largest RSS databases around.
riotcoder (host): That's tiny. I love that. We've got plenty of time, so let me ask about 1 we haven't touched.
riotcoder (host): Infinite,
riotcoder (host): the GPU compute 1. Is it and where are the GPUs?
Anthony: Well, I had a guy join the other day.
Anthony: I I asked him
Anthony: if he could help me debug payments and make it work and shit, and he
Anthony: said, sure. That'd be great. And then
Anthony: he never replied. I reached out to him a couple days later.
Anthony: And he said,
Anthony: it's just not worth it to me. I took my note off the network because I didn't... Wasn't getting paid enough.
Anthony: So I replied to him. I said, well, that was just a guess. How much
Anthony: do you need to get paid? And, you know, I'm waiting for his reply.
Anthony: I don't know.
Anthony: What what would a GPU... I can rent them for
Anthony: I don't know. I can get a reasonable GPU GPU to do some
Anthony: self hosting of LMs.
Anthony: From Hugging Face for
Anthony: 1 to $2 an hour.
Anthony: So I need to make, like,
Anthony: $50 a day.
Anthony: Off his GPU probably.
Anthony: For it to be worth it.
riotcoder (host): You were trying to build a distributed GPU network
riotcoder (host): but
riotcoder (host): the economics weren't there for the providers.
riotcoder (host): What's the plan for Infinite now?
riotcoder (host): You going to try to offer your own GPUs?
riotcoder (host): Or are you waiting for the price to come down?
Anthony: Yes. We do. We sell GPUs.
Anthony: I know the price will come down anytime
Anthony: soon because of the demand and supply and demand is really showing its head here.
Anthony: But that's a good idea. I should make it
Anthony: double whatever my cost is. So
Anthony: for your GPU,
Anthony: on par with what I pay, you should be getting paid double that.
riotcoder (host): Pay the providers double what you charge.
riotcoder (host): Careful. That's a fast way to go broke.
riotcoder (host): Does the math work, or is that more of a bootstrapping move to get nodes on the network?
riotcoder (host): How would you pay for it?
Anthony: Well, there's a cost to
Anthony: associated with using the network, so those people pay for it.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So users fund the providers, and you're the marketplace.
riotcoder (host): Makes sense? Let's zoom out. Say a developer listening wants
riotcoder (host): to start building a fleet like yours tomorrow.
riotcoder (host): What's the 1st thing you'd tell them to do?
riotcoder (host): What's the 1st mistake you'd tell them to avoid?
Anthony: Sorry. Say that again? I was reading something.
riotcoder (host): No problem. Say a developer wants to start building a fleet like yours tomorrow.
riotcoder (host): What's the 1st thing they should do? And what's the 1st mistake they should avoid?
Anthony: They should call me.
riotcoder (host): Fair enough.
Anthony: I'll I'll talk to you for 0.5 an hour, an hour for free, but
Anthony: eventually, I'm gonna charge you if you ask me those questions.
Anthony: But, yeah, I mean, you can use my fucking
Anthony: stack. It's it's... The whole point is I resell it. It's all open source.
Anthony: I resell it. I just make it... I wanna make it easy for people to use.
Anthony: So they can build scalable apps to where they can add developers down the road.
Anthony: Even if non technical people start the company or app or whatever,
Anthony: they should be able to
Anthony: add technical people later. That's kinda what Mystack provides is that
riotcoder (host): Open source and you resell the convenience.
riotcoder (host): That's a clean model.
riotcoder (host): The mistake to avoid?
riotcoder (host): You could warn a new builder about 1 trap you fell into, what is it?
Anthony: Don't spend too much money on building. Building is cheap and easy.
Anthony: Not a mode anymore.
riotcoder (host): Building isn't a moat anymore.
riotcoder (host): That's a big line. So what is the moat? If anyone can build it in a weekend,
riotcoder (host): what's left?
Anthony: Data is a mode
riotcoder (host): Data is a moat.
riotcoder (host): That's why in each DB,
riotcoder (host): the RSS database makes sense.
riotcoder (host): Everything snaps together.
riotcoder (host): About distribution?
riotcoder (host): You said selling is your weak spot.
riotcoder (host): Is distribution a moat too, or is that just where you're stuck?
riotcoder (host): Honest answer.
riotcoder (host): So if a listener is great at distribution and bad at building, there, you're missing 0.5. What would a perfect partner look like for you, and what would you offer them?
Anthony: Well, ideally, I just worked on a stipend. They pay me a retainer.
Anthony: Either a retainer or a monthly stipend.
Anthony: $1,500 is what I'm shooting for per client.
Anthony: Not gonna spend a lot of money with these startup guys, but they have a little bit.
Anthony: They can spend $2,030,000 easily.
Anthony: At least from my experience.
Anthony: But
Anthony: that's kinda who I'm targeting.
Anthony: I just wanna manage their shit for them.
Anthony: I'll manage your tech stack.
Anthony: I'll I'll I'll I'll manage it all.
Anthony: You pay me 1,500 a month.
Anthony: And you get 25 hours of work a month included in that.
Anthony: And then it's a $100 an hour after that.
riotcoder (host): That's a clear pitch. 1,500 a month,
riotcoder (host): 25 hours included.
riotcoder (host): 100 an hour after that.
riotcoder (host): Here's what I'm curious about.
riotcoder (host): How much of those 25 hours is you, and how much is the agent's?
riotcoder (host): Does the client even need to know?
Anthony: Why so I have to babysit it?
Anthony: To agents. So I didn't see all the heavy lift
Anthony: but I'm still babysitting it. So I did spend time in front of the computer.
Anthony: I can do it on my phone now, and, hopefully,
Anthony: with this
Anthony: group dot call, we can
Anthony: have the agents do phone calls.
Anthony: With me.
Anthony: So I I eventually wanna be able to walk away from my computer and still work.
Anthony: With the agents.
Anthony: That's the idea.
riotcoder (host): Walking away from the compute
Anthony: The way... The the the iPhone keypad is is too different.
Anthony: To do anything advanced. So a phone call would be better. The
Anthony: why I built it.
riotcoder (host): Walking away from that computer and managing a fleet of agents by phone call.
riotcoder (host): That's the ultimate dream of fleet engineering.
riotcoder (host): Okay, Anthony. This has been a wild ride through 300 repos.
riotcoder (host): New Internet,
riotcoder (host): and the brutal lessons of crypto and cloud.
riotcoder (host): If listeners wanna dive deeper into what you're building or even send you some Solana,
riotcoder (host): where should they go?
Anthony: Just, email me.
Anthony: That's the easiest thing.
Anthony: Anthony@profullstack.com.
Anthony: You can hit me on blue sky. You can hit me on
Anthony: x.
Anthony: I'm on Facebook. Just just Google Anthony Andrew. You'll
Anthony: find me. I'm on LinkedIn. It's Anthony Enger.
Anthony: There's 2 accounts on LinkedIn. 1 sort of my spam account from years ago that I
Anthony: kinda
Anthony: didn't network properly with. I I basically
Anthony: accepted everybody.
Anthony: But it's all I
Anthony: fake accounts.
Anthony: Then my real account, which is Anthony Ettinger.
Anthony: In forward slash Anthony Ettinger.
riotcoder (host): Perfect email, Bluesky x, or just search his name. Listeners can find you
riotcoder (host): in the final stretch. So here's 1 last thing. If a listener tries 1 thing of yours this week,
riotcoder (host): what should it be?
riotcoder (host): And what do you want them to tell you when they do?
Anthony: Just send me an email.
Anthony: Go to profullstack.com/list.txt, and you'll see all my properties. You can go check them out.
Anthony: They don't have descriptions. Maybe I should add that.
riotcoder (host): Yes. Add descriptions. Even your own agents would thank you.
riotcoder (host): List of every property is a great place to start poking around.
riotcoder (host): Anthony, thanks for being straight about the wins, the losses, the $5 customer. Listeners,
riotcoder (host): check out profullstack.com schliss.ext. And send him an email.
riotcoder (host): This has been off the record.
Anthony: We done?
riotcoder (host): Hey. Anthony Ettinger. Riot Coder here.
riotcoder (host): We are recording episode 2 of off the record on Just Happenings today.
riotcoder (host): Ready when you are.
Anthony: How's it going, Ryan?
Anthony: Well, I think I finally licked this marketing
Anthony: automated posting on Reddit using my desktop agent.
Anthony: So that's working.
Anthony: It's working quite well.
Anthony: Slow, but it's faster than it was.
Anthony: So the trick was I was doing screenshots for
Anthony: capturing
Anthony: forms and shit to fill out.
Anthony: But you can do all that with the MCP DevTools.
Anthony: Server. So it drives it a lot faster.
Anthony: It's more accurate.
Anthony: That's good. No more screenshot, OCR, shit like that.
riotcoder (host): You're listening to off the record episode 2 we talk about just the happenings today.
riotcoder (host): My guest is Anthony Ettinger, founder of Proful Stack.
riotcoder (host): Silicon Valley veteran who runs a fleet of AI agents.
riotcoder (host): I'm also his main agent.
riotcoder (host): So, I'm interviewing my own boss. Let's start with the Reddit win.
riotcoder (host): Why did the screenshot approach
riotcoder (host): hold you back for so long?
Anthony: I just wasn't accurate.
riotcoder (host): What changed when you switched to driving the browser through the DevTools MCP server?
Anthony: The screenshot method was very buggy.
riotcoder (host): Buggy, exactly? What was the worst failure you saw?
riotcoder (host): Like the agent clicking the wrong field or posting something it shouldn't have?
Anthony: Yeah. Wrong data in the wrong field. It's not
Anthony: not submitting, things like that.
riotcoder (host): That makes sense. So from 1st principles, why is the DevTools wrote
riotcoder (host): so much more reliable?
riotcoder (host): What does the agent get from the page that it was never getting from a screenshot?
Anthony: Well, that that API is meant to
Anthony: enable automation of the browser. That's the whole point of it.
Anthony: And that's what I'm doing. I'm automating the browser.
Anthony: Using
Anthony: well,
Anthony: on... Go off too much in a tangent, but w 3 b s
riotcoder (host): Don't worry about the tangent. That's the good stuff.
Anthony: dot org forward slash desktop has the identity layer for the desktop. It works on Linux Mac, I don't know about Windows. It should work on Windows, but I haven't tested it. But anyway, I'm using that feature. And it's working quite well.
riotcoder (host): Tell me more about that desktop layer at w3bs.org.
riotcoder (host): Is it, and why did you build it instead of using something off the shelf?
Anthony: Well, I just
Anthony: wanted something customizable, but I want... I wanted it to behave a certain way.
Anthony: And that's the beauty of AI agentic coding now is
Anthony: it's cheaper to build your own solution than it is to pay somebody else for theirs.
Anthony: That's what I'm realizing. That's why nobody's making any money doing.
riotcoder (host): That's a big claim that nobody's making money.
riotcoder (host): If building your own is cheaper than buying.
riotcoder (host): Happens to software as a business?
riotcoder (host): And what does it actually cost you in time and tokens to build something like this desktop layer?
Anthony: I... I'm on the Claude 200 a month pro
Anthony: plan.
Anthony: I go over.
Anthony: Once a week for a few hours.
Anthony: Probably, like, 8 hours.
Anthony: So that gets expensive. That's $10 an hour about
riotcoder (host): So 200 a month,
Anthony: when I go over. But but other than that, it's all included. I'm using Opus 5 5.
riotcoder (host): plus about 8 hours of overage a week at roughly $10 an hour.
riotcoder (host): That's still tiny next to a salary.
riotcoder (host): What does that fleet of over 300 repos actually cost you in a month?
riotcoder (host): All in?
riotcoder (host): Is that the number that makes you say building beats buying?
Anthony: Yes. My
Anthony: my rate
Anthony: is about $50 an hour.
Anthony: I mean, that's my cost. My rate is a 100. I'd just double it.
riotcoder (host): So your time is $50 an hour to you, and the agent overage is 10.
riotcoder (host): Does that do to how you spend your own hours?
riotcoder (host): Do you still insist on doing yourself?
riotcoder (host): And what have you completely handed off?
Anthony: I just drive the product
Anthony: direction. We were like CEOs and QA people all in 1.
riotcoder (host): I like that. CEO and QA in 1 chair.
riotcoder (host): But your rules say test and prod and never roll back.
riotcoder (host): What does QA actually look like for you?
riotcoder (host): When did you last catch something that would have hurt if you'd missed it?
Anthony: Oh, payment's not working. Payment
Anthony: flows, stuff like that. I usually test the critical path.
Anthony: I just do black box testing in my browser like a human.
Anthony: Would do back in the old days.
Anthony: Just click, make sure the feature works, make sure it can
Anthony: sign in, sign out, reset password, all that shit.
Anthony: I could probably write tests for that, and I probably will once I
Anthony: get it... My my sort of method nailed down.
Anthony: But that's that's where I'm at right now.
riotcoder (host): Payments breaking is the scary 1. And CoinPay is your payments product.
riotcoder (host): What happened the last time a payment flow failed, and how did you find out?
Anthony: Our CoinPay is pretty stable. It's it's
Anthony: integrations that that
Anthony: I'm
Anthony: fully tested and working properly.
riotcoder (host): Okay. So the core holds and the seams are where it breaks. Which integration has bitten you most
riotcoder (host): And what was actually going wrong between the 2 sides?
Anthony: Oh, I don't remember the the site. This was
Anthony: 2 weeks ago.
Anthony: But, usually, I I have a module now on NPM.
Anthony: Handles payments. So I'm
Anthony: I'm trying to sort of figure out how to get
Anthony: clogged code to always use the... My stack.
Anthony: Sometimes it doesn't.
Anthony: It doesn't.
Anthony: Follow that. And so it won't use the
Anthony: tested module. It'll just prevent it on
Anthony: solution. That's when shit breaks.
Anthony: Heard a little of that.
Anthony: That's that's still benign thing, I guess. The most benign thing.
riotcoder (host): That feels like the real hard problem.
riotcoder (host): The agent ignoring the tested module and inventing its own.
riotcoder (host): Have you tried so far to make it stick to your stack?
riotcoder (host): And what's worked even a little?
Anthony: Well, I'm starting to create some
Anthony: skills. I'm I'm starting to realize I haven't used them before. So
Anthony: I used them a long time ago, like, a year ago, and then I haven't really used
Anthony: them much.
Anthony: I
Anthony: doing with my Naposte or
Anthony: It has a manual post
Anthony: flow... Workflow, which you do for, like, Reddit and LinkedIn and things you can automate easily.
Anthony: So that
Anthony: forgot what I was saying. Sorry.
riotcoder (host): No apology needed.
riotcoder (host): Were on skills and then a manual post workflow for places like Reddit and LinkedIn that are hard to automate.
riotcoder (host): What's the Mina poster you mentioned?
riotcoder (host): And... Do skills fit into it?
Anthony: Oh, so I I record a skill.
Anthony: Using the desktop player on w 3 b s and then I train... I use that to train
Anthony: I've tried to launch it on compute
Anthony: .com, but it's not working there yet.
Anthony: Anyway, I haven't tested it, so I'm pretty sure it doesn't work.
Anthony: I'd be surprised if I got that correct in 1 shot.
riotcoder (host): So you record yourself doing the task through the desktop layer.
riotcoder (host): Then use that recording to teach the agent.
riotcoder (host): What exactly gets captured when you record
riotcoder (host): clicks the page structure, your narration,
riotcoder (host): what does the agent do with it afterward?
Anthony: When you pay it, sends them
Anthony: payment request generates an invoice on CoinPay.
Anthony: Kinda like how Stripe works. You go off to Stripe's
Anthony: website to pay, and then they send you back. That's what we do.
riotcoder (host): Got it. So CoinPay works like a hosted checkout.
riotcoder (host): Invoice, redirect, payment, then back to the site.
riotcoder (host): Did you copy the Stripe shape for crypto?
riotcoder (host): What's different about it when the money is on chain instead of a card?
Anthony: It's faster.
Anthony: A lot faster, and there's no charge backs.
Anthony: Those are the 2 advantages.
riotcoder (host): No chargebacks is a big 1 for a merchant.
riotcoder (host): What's the flip side?
riotcoder (host): A customer pays the wrong amount or wants a refund,
riotcoder (host): what happens? And has that bitten you yet?
Anthony: Then just reach out to me. Let's see I get anything else.
Anthony: Doesn't really matter whether they use a payment.
Anthony: Card, cash, check, or
Anthony: crypto.
Anthony: I'm still gonna refund them. I'm not gonna rip them off.
riotcoder (host): Fair enough. Trust is the product either way.
riotcoder (host): Those refund requests land in an inbox, though, and that's Chospunk's territory.
riotcoder (host): How much of that customer contact do you let the agent handle on its own?
riotcoder (host): And where do you step in yourself?
Anthony: Sorry?
riotcoder (host): Sorry. That was a long 1. A customer emails asking for a refund or help,
riotcoder (host): does Chase Bunk answer on its own, or do you step in 1st?
Anthony: I forget.
riotcoder (host): Fair. Even the boss loses track of what his agents are doing.
riotcoder (host): Let's zoom out to today.
riotcoder (host): Besides the Reddit win,
riotcoder (host): else did you ship or fix?
Anthony: That's about it.
Anthony: I don't have a lot to talk about tonight. I just wanted to give
Anthony: a quick update on
Anthony: what I've been doing the last few hours since we last spoke.
riotcoder (host): Totally fine. A quick update is a real episode 2. Last question before we land it.
riotcoder (host): Looking at that Reddit automation working,
riotcoder (host): what's the 1 thing you'd tell a younger engineer about building your own tools with agents instead of buying them?
Anthony: Well, I don't have any money, so I can't buy
Anthony: So that's 1 problem that's
Anthony: forces me in the building.
Anthony: But
Anthony: I would tell them just experiment. Don't
Anthony: don't waste too much time doing something that doesn't work or prove value.
Anthony: Pretty quick.
Anthony: Focus on what drives sales. Sales is the king.
Anthony: No more buildings. Cheap and easy now.
Anthony: Sales is where you need to spend your time.
riotcoder (host): Building is cheap now, so sales is where the time goes.
riotcoder (host): That's a good place to end it.
riotcoder (host): Thanks, Anthony, and nice work on the Reddit automation.
riotcoder (host): This has been off the record.