Meeting Title: Brainforge Coding Tools Discussion Date: 2026-02-18 Meeting participants: Brylle Girang, Clarence Stone
WEBVTT
1 00:01:19.970 ⇒ 00:01:21.359 Clarence Stone: Hey, how’s it going?
2 00:01:21.360 ⇒ 00:01:26.960 Brylle Girang: Hey! I’m doing great! How are you doing? Did you get your… did you get your hair cut?
3 00:01:27.110 ⇒ 00:01:28.300 Clarence Stone: Yeah, yeah.
4 00:01:28.300 ⇒ 00:01:28.860 Brylle Girang: A little hot.
5 00:01:28.860 ⇒ 00:01:33.719 Clarence Stone: Besides, because it was getting too long, spent too much time coding, you know?
6 00:01:33.930 ⇒ 00:01:45.290 Brylle Girang: Yeah, I’m amazed, Clarence. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to check out the open code CLI yet, but I’m trying to get myself immersed into Cursor.
7 00:01:45.470 ⇒ 00:01:49.780 Brylle Girang: In the meantime. But, can you tell me more about what the difference is?
8 00:01:51.000 ⇒ 00:01:52.099 Clarence Stone: Between what?
9 00:01:52.100 ⇒ 00:01:55.789 Brylle Girang: Between cursor and OpenCode, the one that you built?
10 00:01:55.790 ⇒ 00:02:04.769 Clarence Stone: Okay, yeah, so if you think about it this way, there’s almost, like, two different ways these AI coding agents came to be.
11 00:02:04.850 ⇒ 00:02:13.309 Brylle Girang: The biggest news that, you know, we learned about when all of this began was it was just an extension in VS Code.
12 00:02:13.310 ⇒ 00:02:15.729 Clarence Stone: Right, remember, it was Copilot for code.
13 00:02:15.730 ⇒ 00:02:16.260 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
14 00:02:16.260 ⇒ 00:02:22.029 Clarence Stone: And it was very simple. It, like, when you hit tab, it would guess what you were gonna fill in.
15 00:02:22.030 ⇒ 00:02:22.500 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
16 00:02:22.500 ⇒ 00:02:31.139 Clarence Stone: Right, so that’s where it started. And then this company called Cursor started taking VS Code and started putting on their own customizations.
17 00:02:31.940 ⇒ 00:02:36.149 Clarence Stone: And that’s why, like, that’s how Cursor is the way it is today.
18 00:02:37.160 ⇒ 00:02:38.060 Clarence Stone: Right?
19 00:02:38.350 ⇒ 00:02:38.940 Brylle Girang: Yep.
20 00:02:39.900 ⇒ 00:02:42.100 Clarence Stone: Sorry, Uten’s messaging me.
21 00:02:42.270 ⇒ 00:02:43.200 Brylle Girang: It’s okay.
22 00:02:52.140 ⇒ 00:02:59.920 Clarence Stone: Okay, so… and then there’s a flip side to all of it. There’s the school of… of… of…
23 00:03:00.190 ⇒ 00:03:06.190 Clarence Stone: Claude in Anthropic. Anthropic said, like, we’re not gonna build on top of VS Code.
24 00:03:07.290 ⇒ 00:03:14.190 Clarence Stone: Right? We’re gonna build our own coding solution, and their internal team was using something called,
25 00:03:14.660 ⇒ 00:03:29.969 Clarence Stone: like, just the CLI. Like, they were just in command line. And they were, you know, so if you ever use Olama, the original version of it was just, you say Olama, launch Llama 3.1, and then you just get a command line. That’s all cloud code is.
26 00:03:31.830 ⇒ 00:03:46.339 Clarence Stone: Right? With… and then they’re like, okay, well, we want coding features on top of that, right? So, let’s put in some skills, let’s put in some capabilities. Just like, you know, Cursor was saying, like, okay, VS Code is good, but we want this and we want that.
27 00:03:47.490 ⇒ 00:03:57.770 Clarence Stone: Alright, so, today, there’s really two categories of coding tools. You have Windsurf, Cursor, which are all built on VS Code.
28 00:03:57.960 ⇒ 00:04:00.720 Clarence Stone: And then you have CLI, command line based.
29 00:04:01.220 ⇒ 00:04:04.860 Clarence Stone: coding tools, like, you know, codecs.
30 00:04:05.110 ⇒ 00:04:09.619 Clarence Stone: You know, obviously open code and cloud code.
31 00:04:13.030 ⇒ 00:04:16.449 Brylle Girang: So, the one… I’m just trying to rephrase this into…
32 00:04:16.610 ⇒ 00:04:24.350 Brylle Girang: a more digestible format for me. The other side are maybe the IDEs and steroids.
33 00:04:25.130 ⇒ 00:04:33.310 Brylle Girang: the, VS Code Copilot, a cursor, etc. And then the other side is more…
34 00:04:33.960 ⇒ 00:04:37.729 Brylle Girang: of a chatbot on steroids, is that right?
35 00:04:38.440 ⇒ 00:04:45.590 Clarence Stone: Not really. It’s really the, the, the… the engine.
36 00:04:46.140 ⇒ 00:04:50.019 Clarence Stone: the engine behind Cloud Code and, and, and, and,
37 00:04:50.210 ⇒ 00:04:53.119 Clarence Stone: Open code is a command line interface.
38 00:04:53.880 ⇒ 00:04:55.360 Brylle Girang: Okay.
39 00:04:55.360 ⇒ 00:05:00.009 Clarence Stone: The engine behind Windsurf and Cursor is VS Code.
40 00:05:00.200 ⇒ 00:05:01.440 Clarence Stone: It’s an ID.
41 00:05:01.680 ⇒ 00:05:14.540 Clarence Stone: Yeah, gotcha. So it’s really just two formats on how you want to use it, and by the way, like, they’re really starting to get fuzzy, because you could run, open code in your windsurf, or cursor.
42 00:05:14.540 ⇒ 00:05:15.090 Brylle Girang: Okay.
43 00:05:15.610 ⇒ 00:05:19.820 Clarence Stone: So, like, it was an interesting thing. I tried it one day, because, like, you could have…
44 00:05:20.110 ⇒ 00:05:29.660 Clarence Stone: You can have Claude Code or OpenCode review the code that cursor’s writing, because the command line can see everything that’s being written.
45 00:05:29.660 ⇒ 00:05:32.690 Brylle Girang: So it’s live reviewing code. Yeah.
46 00:05:33.370 ⇒ 00:05:51.790 Clarence Stone: So, yeah, so it’s interesting things, but, like, long story short, it doesn’t matter, right? The format of the CLI, with codecs and, you know, Anthropic’s version and OpenCode, they’re just so much easier to build enhancements on top of, because at the core of it, it’s a command line.
47 00:05:51.790 ⇒ 00:05:56.190 Clarence Stone: If you want to add customizations to Cursor, you have to make VS Code extensions.
48 00:05:56.530 ⇒ 00:05:58.430 Brylle Girang: Mmm, okay.
49 00:05:58.580 ⇒ 00:06:01.190 Brylle Girang: Right. So that’s the main… that’s the main pro, okay.
50 00:06:01.190 ⇒ 00:06:15.729 Clarence Stone: Yeah, so that’s why, like, when you see Claude Co-work and all of these things, like, they got created because it was just additions to the command line interface. Everything behind what you see, in Anthropic is command line.
51 00:06:17.320 ⇒ 00:06:21.920 Clarence Stone: And their vision of the future is that everything is actually code. That’s it, nothing else.
52 00:06:23.790 ⇒ 00:06:32.939 Brylle Girang: That makes sense. So, in the long term, but, like, do you see most of the team here at Brainforge using CLIs, or…
53 00:06:33.690 ⇒ 00:06:34.160 Clarence Stone: well.
54 00:06:34.160 ⇒ 00:06:35.019 Brylle Girang: I’m gonna do it.
55 00:06:35.400 ⇒ 00:06:40.940 Clarence Stone: I did both. I, I’m… so, the reason why I was like, hey, check this out, is I did both.
56 00:06:42.130 ⇒ 00:06:49.490 Clarence Stone: I think you… so, by the way, like, Uteam and I have separate companies, so this is branded a little bit differently, but…
57 00:06:49.490 ⇒ 00:06:50.410 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
58 00:06:50.560 ⇒ 00:06:53.650 Clarence Stone: So, this is vicinity work.
59 00:06:54.050 ⇒ 00:06:55.090 Brylle Girang: Right?
60 00:06:55.090 ⇒ 00:06:58.480 Clarence Stone: And if you notice down here, I have two services running.
61 00:06:58.610 ⇒ 00:07:00.880 Clarence Stone: That is open code.
62 00:07:01.850 ⇒ 00:07:02.690 Brylle Girang: Gotcha.
63 00:07:03.040 ⇒ 00:07:05.850 Clarence Stone: And this is the work server.
64 00:07:07.580 ⇒ 00:07:13.540 Clarence Stone: Right, so if I send commands to this chat, it’s actually getting processed through open code.
65 00:07:13.670 ⇒ 00:07:15.290 Brylle Girang: Gotcha.
66 00:07:15.700 ⇒ 00:07:22.080 Clarence Stone: And just like when you use Claude Co-work, and you generate a PDF or do research, it’s getting pushed through Cloud Code.
67 00:07:24.230 ⇒ 00:07:31.499 Clarence Stone: Right? But I made this interface, and now, like, I can set up workers, I can create a new worker, lock it into a folder.
68 00:07:31.640 ⇒ 00:07:32.120 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
69 00:07:32.120 ⇒ 00:07:40.809 Clarence Stone: Right? And let’s say, like, you know, we have Lilo, or PRDs, or whatever, right? Like, we can put that in, and it becomes the context store for any conversation that you have.
70 00:07:41.370 ⇒ 00:07:48.000 Clarence Stone: Right. And just like, you know, everything that we’ve been doing, in Cursor, there’s skills.
71 00:07:50.730 ⇒ 00:07:54.960 Clarence Stone: Right? So I can trigger all of these skills, in the chats.
72 00:07:55.210 ⇒ 00:07:59.650 Clarence Stone: I have MCPs and extensions in the chats, but I made interfaces for everything.
73 00:08:00.000 ⇒ 00:08:00.600 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
74 00:08:01.370 ⇒ 00:08:05.610 Clarence Stone: And if I wanted my messages forwarded, or I want to integrate Slack, it’s here too.
75 00:08:07.170 ⇒ 00:08:24.870 Clarence Stone: Now, UTAM doesn’t care about this as much, but I care. I run my whole life around automations. So now I have pron jobs and automations that do things. So, for example, as soon as a research task is complete, I want another, the skill to review research to activate.
76 00:08:25.510 ⇒ 00:08:27.000 Clarence Stone: You set that up here.
77 00:08:27.430 ⇒ 00:08:27.990 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
78 00:08:28.520 ⇒ 00:08:29.470 Brylle Girang: Gotcha.
79 00:08:30.060 ⇒ 00:08:37.919 Clarence Stone: Right? And then, like, there’s the agentic factor. I can create agents by creating a soul and a heartbeat.
80 00:08:41.110 ⇒ 00:08:44.969 Clarence Stone: So basically, I took Open Claw, I took…
81 00:08:45.120 ⇒ 00:08:48.860 Clarence Stone: the skills that you guys are making in Cursor, I took…
82 00:08:49.430 ⇒ 00:08:54.440 Clarence Stone: I don’t know, like, the way Anthropic does, you know, Anthropic work.
83 00:08:54.850 ⇒ 00:08:57.020 Clarence Stone: And I just jammed it into one thing.
84 00:08:58.830 ⇒ 00:09:00.640 Brylle Girang: This is amazing. Wow.
85 00:09:00.640 ⇒ 00:09:21.130 Clarence Stone: And the release that you have actually is a Brainforge version, with all the Brainforge skills. I extracted all of them, and I said, standardize them to Cloud format, and make them work, and they all worked. I tried the UTAM bot, I tried the second brain, I tried, you know, a bunch of them, and they’re all just totally fine. But you know what’s really interesting, B, like, when,
86 00:09:21.740 ⇒ 00:09:29.440 Clarence Stone: People don’t realize that this format still means that because in the background it is a, coding agent.
87 00:09:29.860 ⇒ 00:09:37.659 Clarence Stone: Right? I’m trying to get authentication keys to actually make this an app. You’ll notice this isn’t a macOS app.
88 00:09:37.850 ⇒ 00:09:38.510 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
89 00:09:38.940 ⇒ 00:09:54.860 Clarence Stone: So I need to get developer licenses so I can share it with you guys, like, this is just in dev mode for me, so I’m trying to get these private keys and public keys sorted out, and it’s like, hey, you should write this, you should write this, right? Okay, so, can you do everything for me? The dev keys are in the folder.
90 00:09:55.090 ⇒ 00:09:58.680 Clarence Stone: And guess what? It just goes straight in, just like Cloud Code.
91 00:09:58.850 ⇒ 00:10:00.030 Clarence Stone: It’s coding.
92 00:10:01.340 ⇒ 00:10:06.000 Clarence Stone: You’ll see, you see all of these greps, It’s coding.
93 00:10:06.250 ⇒ 00:10:06.770 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
94 00:10:07.900 ⇒ 00:10:13.380 Clarence Stone: And then it says, okay, I generated this here, this was the… and you have new certificates in your folder.
95 00:10:17.380 ⇒ 00:10:22.800 Clarence Stone: So there’s a coding engine behind this, but it looks just like something that a business user would use.
96 00:10:22.800 ⇒ 00:10:24.650 Brylle Girang: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
97 00:10:25.700 ⇒ 00:10:33.090 Clarence Stone: So, this is what I told Utam, I was like, we need to sell this, number one. Number two, your team needs to use this now.
98 00:10:34.160 ⇒ 00:10:41.540 Clarence Stone: Now they have no excuse. They can come in and say, oh, I have a Lilo question, make a Lilo worker, right? Ask the Lilo question.
99 00:10:41.860 ⇒ 00:10:46.159 Brylle Girang: I totally agree, I totally agree. If the friction point is
100 00:10:46.450 ⇒ 00:10:52.190 Brylle Girang: how intimidating cursor looks for the team, this will totally solve that problem.
101 00:10:52.510 ⇒ 00:11:07.639 Clarence Stone: Yeah. Like, I mean, look, it’s backing up things, it’s adding into memory, so it also has my custom memory systems that I wrote out before, so… and it created brand new certifications for me. I was like, okay, which option do I pick, blah blah blah, right? It’s coding.
102 00:11:07.890 ⇒ 00:11:09.760 Clarence Stone: It’s actually creating new things.
103 00:11:10.690 ⇒ 00:11:13.450 Clarence Stone: It’s uploading the CSR file now.
104 00:11:14.370 ⇒ 00:11:16.259 Clarence Stone: I downloaded your certificates.
105 00:11:19.870 ⇒ 00:11:21.799 Clarence Stone: Nobody’s doing this, B.
106 00:11:22.160 ⇒ 00:11:22.520 Brylle Girang: Yay!
107 00:11:22.520 ⇒ 00:11:26.880 Clarence Stone: When I showed it to him, he lost his mind. I was like, oh, there’s something on the weekend that I worked on.
108 00:11:27.560 ⇒ 00:11:33.989 Clarence Stone: So the way I did this, I took OpenClaw, and I got rid of all of the pieces that I didn’t want.
109 00:11:36.350 ⇒ 00:11:44.469 Clarence Stone: And then, I was always running OpenClaw with open code, so I took that piece of my stack and started moving things into it.
110 00:11:44.990 ⇒ 00:11:46.979 Clarence Stone: And I built all of this in a weekend.
111 00:11:47.390 ⇒ 00:11:49.210 Brylle Girang: Wow, Billy? Like…
112 00:11:49.210 ⇒ 00:11:49.880 Clarence Stone: Yep.
113 00:11:50.330 ⇒ 00:11:52.520 Clarence Stone: Everything you’re seeing here was built on a weekend.
114 00:11:55.130 ⇒ 00:11:55.750 Brylle Girang: Wow.
115 00:11:55.750 ⇒ 00:12:18.570 Clarence Stone: And then I have a, like, some setting things that you can do, right? So, like, you can check your API provider, you, whoops, we don’t want Copilot. There’s Anthropic, GitHub, Google, Olama, OpenAI, Open Router, Perplexity, you know, all your keys, whatever you want to use, right? So I did as many integrations that came, you know, from GitHub that I can steal.
116 00:12:18.590 ⇒ 00:12:33.190 Clarence Stone: You can pick your models, you can put thinking on, you can create model variants if you want. And then, like, there is a backend server that needs to run, because that actually communicates with open code. It also drives the automations.
117 00:12:33.640 ⇒ 00:12:34.470 Brylle Girang: Gotcha.
118 00:12:34.470 ⇒ 00:12:44.170 Clarence Stone: Right? So, there’s this panel to handle all of those problems. But yeah, I mean, that’s what I put together, and I said, now you have an interface, and your team doesn’t have to go into Cursor.
119 00:12:44.340 ⇒ 00:12:44.950 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
120 00:12:47.250 ⇒ 00:12:47.920 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
121 00:12:49.180 ⇒ 00:12:52.070 Brylle Girang: Has anybody adopted it, adopted this yet?
122 00:12:52.450 ⇒ 00:12:55.379 Clarence Stone: Dude, no one knows about it, I just told Utamet on Monday.
123 00:12:55.380 ⇒ 00:12:56.259 Brylle Girang: I was like.
124 00:12:56.260 ⇒ 00:13:03.410 Clarence Stone: hey, because, like, I built this, and I don’t want to use other people’s code, right? So I said, hey, can I have permission to use your vault to test this?
125 00:13:03.410 ⇒ 00:13:03.990 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
126 00:13:04.320 ⇒ 00:13:10.359 Clarence Stone: So I hydrated it with all of his vault stuff, and it worked great. So exactly… actually, I could probably do that.
127 00:13:10.700 ⇒ 00:13:12.129 Clarence Stone: Let’s find the vault.
128 00:13:13.640 ⇒ 00:13:15.770 Clarence Stone: It was…
129 00:13:19.070 ⇒ 00:13:20.020 Clarence Stone: This one.
130 00:13:20.350 ⇒ 00:13:21.790 Clarence Stone: Right,
131 00:13:25.330 ⇒ 00:13:27.609 Clarence Stone: Yeah, I think this is most of it.
132 00:13:30.710 ⇒ 00:13:31.620 Clarence Stone: Okay.
133 00:13:32.120 ⇒ 00:13:35.800 Clarence Stone: It’s loading a little bit, so it’s loading the memory workspace.
134 00:13:35.800 ⇒ 00:13:36.440 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
135 00:13:36.440 ⇒ 00:13:38.199 Clarence Stone: And then it goes,
136 00:13:46.180 ⇒ 00:13:47.190 Clarence Stone: Let’s see.
137 00:13:48.480 ⇒ 00:13:51.160 Clarence Stone: Oh, I feel the computer burning.
138 00:13:51.320 ⇒ 00:13:52.730 Clarence Stone: Maybe it’s,
139 00:13:53.520 ⇒ 00:13:57.560 Clarence Stone: I have to give it time, because, by the way, I’m not using cloud models. Everything is local.
140 00:13:58.380 ⇒ 00:13:59.760 Brylle Girang: Oh, wow.
141 00:14:00.090 ⇒ 00:14:00.800 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
142 00:14:02.820 ⇒ 00:14:03.830 Clarence Stone: I code everything.
143 00:14:03.830 ⇒ 00:14:06.070 Brylle Girang: What are you using? What device are you using?
144 00:14:06.220 ⇒ 00:14:07.990 Clarence Stone: I have two Mac Ultras.
145 00:14:10.060 ⇒ 00:14:12.120 Brylle Girang: Running TMP 2.5.
146 00:14:13.020 ⇒ 00:14:13.670 Brylle Girang: I bought…
147 00:14:13.670 ⇒ 00:14:15.529 Clarence Stone: And then just the laptop, yeah.
148 00:14:15.530 ⇒ 00:14:19.120 Brylle Girang: I have only read about those through LinkedIn posts. This is my…
149 00:14:19.120 ⇒ 00:14:21.899 Clarence Stone: They were so expensive. I spent so much money.
150 00:14:23.610 ⇒ 00:14:39.640 Clarence Stone: Yeah, and it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s memory loading right now. I picked it too big of a folder. So, yeah, this is, you know, this is just, like, brand new stuff that I was testing out. It was like, what if we took everything Brainforge was doing, and then, like, there we go. Okay.
151 00:14:40.110 ⇒ 00:14:40.770 Clarence Stone: Bye.
152 00:14:41.370 ⇒ 00:14:42.320 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
153 00:14:42.950 ⇒ 00:14:43.610 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
154 00:14:57.870 ⇒ 00:15:01.209 Clarence Stone: Is it answering yet? No, it’s still stuck. Oh, there it is.
155 00:15:01.700 ⇒ 00:15:06.719 Clarence Stone: Okay, cool. It works. Okay, can you tell me about brain portion?
156 00:15:13.950 ⇒ 00:15:14.720 Clarence Stone: Oh!
157 00:15:14.900 ⇒ 00:15:19.190 Clarence Stone: You see the memory system? It says, I’d be happy to tell you, and it’s reading Brainforge Vault.
158 00:15:22.930 ⇒ 00:15:24.789 Clarence Stone: Do you see the right side artifacts?
159 00:15:24.790 ⇒ 00:15:26.130 Brylle Girang: Wow, okay.
160 00:15:30.880 ⇒ 00:15:32.139 Clarence Stone: Is it correct?
161 00:15:32.850 ⇒ 00:15:34.410 Brylle Girang: Yeah, definitely.
162 00:15:34.410 ⇒ 00:15:36.250 Clarence Stone: Yeah, that’s what I built.
163 00:15:37.770 ⇒ 00:15:39.400 Brylle Girang: This is amazing, wow.
164 00:15:41.660 ⇒ 00:15:46.089 Clarence Stone: Right? And look, playbooks, it’s telling you everything, and the vision.
165 00:15:46.320 ⇒ 00:15:49.870 Clarence Stone: And by the way, you can cue the skills by doing the slash pattern.
166 00:15:49.870 ⇒ 00:15:51.130 Brylle Girang: Yeah, okay.
167 00:15:51.130 ⇒ 00:15:54.769 Clarence Stone: Right? So… Whatever you want to put in.
168 00:15:56.150 ⇒ 00:16:03.740 Clarence Stone: Yeah, that’s what I wanted to share with you. I don’t know, like, all the work that you’re doing, right? All the skills that you build, it really just ends up here.
169 00:16:04.110 ⇒ 00:16:04.730 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
170 00:16:06.110 ⇒ 00:16:09.560 Clarence Stone: Right? These are the ones I use all the time, this is my skill stack.
171 00:16:10.870 ⇒ 00:16:17.860 Clarence Stone: But, you know, if you look down here, you can… you can, open a skills folder, import existing skills.
172 00:16:18.350 ⇒ 00:16:23.760 Clarence Stone: So you don’t even, like, if you make a new skill for Luke, you don’t even have to tell him to pull from the repo.
173 00:16:25.840 ⇒ 00:16:27.070 Brylle Girang: You can just import.
174 00:16:27.300 ⇒ 00:16:32.460 Clarence Stone: You just import it there. And then, like, I also created a skill creator.
175 00:16:34.150 ⇒ 00:16:40.599 Clarence Stone: Where, like, you can start a… you can create a new skill in chat. So you… you trigger Skill Creator.
176 00:16:41.030 ⇒ 00:16:43.899 Clarence Stone: And then it’s just gonna walk you through creating a new skill.
177 00:16:49.720 ⇒ 00:16:53.789 Clarence Stone: Right? Like, what do you want to name the skill? What does it do? How do you want to set it up?
178 00:16:54.400 ⇒ 00:16:54.970 Brylle Girang: Sure.
179 00:16:57.190 ⇒ 00:17:03.089 Clarence Stone: Right? And there’s a little tip, the best skills are created after you’ve done a task, right? So you can even let people make skills.
180 00:17:03.630 ⇒ 00:17:05.440 Brylle Girang: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
181 00:17:07.170 ⇒ 00:17:10.210 Brylle Girang: This is amazing, going to try this out.
182 00:17:10.579 ⇒ 00:17:11.219 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
183 00:17:11.499 ⇒ 00:17:25.209 Clarence Stone: Okay. So I gave you the base code. It is not in this application wrapper. I’m just making a ton of enhancements because, like, it was… it’s still buggy, the one that’s in the codebase. And you’ll notice this is still buggy, too. It’s…
184 00:17:25.279 ⇒ 00:17:36.069 Clarence Stone: I have some problem with the way it’s caching memories, and that’s why I created the artifacts panel, but I, you know, it’s another day, I’ll fix it. But I’m actually using it for work. You saw all the.
185 00:17:36.410 ⇒ 00:17:36.730 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
186 00:17:36.730 ⇒ 00:17:46.930 Clarence Stone: that I was sending back and forth already. I told you, Tom, I was like, it’s very useful, right? And then you have your normal, you know, search within the chat, you know, rename or delete sessions, that’s it.
187 00:17:47.550 ⇒ 00:17:57.139 Clarence Stone: Like, what else do you need to be working, right? Oh, I installed Nano Banana, and because these models are multimodal, so you can upload images as well.
188 00:17:57.660 ⇒ 00:17:58.190 Brylle Girang: Wow.
189 00:17:58.190 ⇒ 00:17:59.219 Clarence Stone: evidence here.
190 00:17:59.560 ⇒ 00:18:01.110 Brylle Girang: Gotcha, okay.
191 00:18:01.630 ⇒ 00:18:02.300 Brylle Girang: Okay.
192 00:18:03.800 ⇒ 00:18:05.559 Clarence Stone: Yeah, that’s it.
193 00:18:06.130 ⇒ 00:18:09.769 Brylle Girang: This skill system is really amazing. I think that would help a lot.
194 00:18:10.270 ⇒ 00:18:10.940 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
195 00:18:11.290 ⇒ 00:18:12.250 Brylle Girang: What else?
196 00:18:13.260 ⇒ 00:18:17.970 Brylle Girang: Okay, gosh, I’m going to take a look at this, man. I’m excited.
197 00:18:18.130 ⇒ 00:18:23.669 Brylle Girang: So, how did you build this? Like, did you vibe code this, or…
198 00:18:24.070 ⇒ 00:18:25.320 Clarence Stone: highly vibe-coded.
199 00:18:25.320 ⇒ 00:18:26.530 Brylle Girang: Wow.
200 00:18:27.830 ⇒ 00:18:28.890 Brylle Girang: Wow.
201 00:18:29.660 ⇒ 00:18:33.370 Clarence Stone: Yeah, it was working after 3 prompts.
202 00:18:35.360 ⇒ 00:18:36.590 Brylle Girang: Really? What?
203 00:18:38.850 ⇒ 00:18:39.500 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
204 00:18:41.140 ⇒ 00:18:46.250 Brylle Girang: I need to… dedicate my weekends to something like this.
205 00:18:46.250 ⇒ 00:18:50.940 Clarence Stone: B, here’s the secret. I led many technical teams.
206 00:18:51.650 ⇒ 00:18:54.299 Clarence Stone: Like, I may not actually code.
207 00:18:54.410 ⇒ 00:19:09.359 Clarence Stone: But, like, but I knew how to code at some point, and I knew what the business needs, and I said, hey, like, this is how you need to build it. Most of the time, I make diagrams like that to say, this is how your architecture needs to be. So many of the times, I’m driving what the architecture is.
208 00:19:10.450 ⇒ 00:19:18.719 Clarence Stone: Right? And I say, well, it has to be built this way because the business needs to read this way. So, I’ve gotten very good at writing PRDs.
209 00:19:19.980 ⇒ 00:19:33.530 Clarence Stone: And the better your PRDs and plans are, the better your code becomes, especially when you’re starting off. I probably spend, like, 35 to an hour building a really, really, really long product requirements document.
210 00:19:33.940 ⇒ 00:19:37.800 Clarence Stone: And, I actually use Gemini for it.
211 00:19:38.000 ⇒ 00:19:38.570 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
212 00:19:38.810 ⇒ 00:19:42.560 Clarence Stone: I said, hey, Gemini, you’re my thought partner, we are not coding.
213 00:19:43.390 ⇒ 00:19:52.159 Clarence Stone: Right? But you’re gonna… you’re gonna help me think about how to make this real by suggesting platforms, frameworks, architecture.
214 00:19:52.460 ⇒ 00:19:55.230 Clarence Stone: Right? And I’m gonna give you the business requirements.
215 00:19:55.760 ⇒ 00:20:13.310 Clarence Stone: Users need to do this, this is the experience I want, these are the features I want. It’ll say, okay, you can use that platform for this, and this is what the architecture would look like, right? And I kind of go back and forth for a ton of times, and then I take that whole thing, and then say, Opus 4.6, create a code plan.
216 00:20:14.540 ⇒ 00:20:24.669 Clarence Stone: So it went from, like, a product requirements document to a coding plan, and then I just used Kimi for free at home to go through the loops. And Kimi just keeps going.
217 00:20:24.890 ⇒ 00:20:27.709 Clarence Stone: So, it really just took 3 prompts in Kimi.
218 00:20:29.150 ⇒ 00:20:33.899 Clarence Stone: So that’s my tip to you on really big coding projects like this.
219 00:20:35.620 ⇒ 00:20:38.199 Brylle Girang: create PR, this will drive the project, okay.
220 00:20:38.200 ⇒ 00:20:38.810 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
221 00:20:39.090 ⇒ 00:20:39.950 Brylle Girang: Gotcha.
222 00:20:39.950 ⇒ 00:20:44.959 Clarence Stone: And, like, you have to even read your own stuff, making sure that you didn’t contradict yourself.
223 00:20:44.960 ⇒ 00:20:45.960 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
224 00:20:45.960 ⇒ 00:21:09.360 Clarence Stone: Right? Like, I even ask it, like, hey, did I contradict myself? Like, does this flow make sense? You know, if you were, you know, a, you know, marketing professional in an AI company, would this be more valuable to you than cursor? And it’ll say, no, actually, like, you know, Luke would probably want to create images, too. Okay, fine, let’s do multimodal, you know, chat box, whatever.
225 00:21:10.830 ⇒ 00:21:11.620 Clarence Stone: Right.
226 00:21:12.230 ⇒ 00:21:14.590 Brylle Girang: So the ideation part is so important.
227 00:21:14.780 ⇒ 00:21:23.820 Brylle Girang: So, how did you come to this, Clarence? I saw you mention once that technology has changed your jobs almost every year.
228 00:21:24.110 ⇒ 00:21:24.440 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
229 00:21:24.440 ⇒ 00:21:25.920 Brylle Girang: What has happened?
230 00:21:26.510 ⇒ 00:21:30.069 Clarence Stone: So, let me put it this way, I was pre-med.
231 00:21:30.530 ⇒ 00:21:38.039 Clarence Stone: And I didn’t go to medical school, and my parents were a little upset with me, but, I got into an accelerator.
232 00:21:38.360 ⇒ 00:21:45.110 Clarence Stone: So, like, a startup. And they gave us money, and we built a product, and you know.
233 00:21:45.360 ⇒ 00:21:50.779 Clarence Stone: 2-3 months in, I was just like, We don’t have enough developers.
234 00:21:51.530 ⇒ 00:21:54.300 Clarence Stone: Like, there’s, like, two coders.
235 00:21:54.640 ⇒ 00:22:10.699 Clarence Stone: there’s me, there’s the marketing team, and the CEO. Like, I’m the COO, I’m supposed to be overlooking them and, like, driving financial revenue. And this is kind of the role that I’m playing that you notice at Brainforge. Like, I’m naturally a COO, like, an operational structure, like, strategy kind of person, right? So…
236 00:22:10.850 ⇒ 00:22:13.369 Clarence Stone: But I noticed that I wasn’t gonna get any developers.
237 00:22:13.650 ⇒ 00:22:17.389 Clarence Stone: So, I learned… I taught myself how to do front-end development.
238 00:22:19.390 ⇒ 00:22:21.899 Clarence Stone: And that got me my first job.
239 00:22:22.340 ⇒ 00:22:27.329 Clarence Stone: And it was a moment where there were too many front-end developers, so I learned UX design.
240 00:22:27.990 ⇒ 00:22:37.979 Clarence Stone: So, what I did after learning UX design, I would say, hey, you can go hire another front-end developer, but you won’t find anybody that can go from idea to product.
241 00:22:39.170 ⇒ 00:22:40.130 Clarence Stone: I can.
242 00:22:41.620 ⇒ 00:22:46.200 Clarence Stone: Right? So, like, I learned that skill set. And then, like.
243 00:22:46.360 ⇒ 00:22:57.430 Clarence Stone: when I joined the military, I had to learn about networks and communications and connections. So I understood how, like, backend communications interact with APIs and servers.
244 00:22:57.690 ⇒ 00:23:02.770 Clarence Stone: So I understand the concepts, but I never really coded that much on backend.
245 00:23:02.910 ⇒ 00:23:06.730 Clarence Stone: And that was always my weakness on being a complete full stack.
246 00:23:07.490 ⇒ 00:23:24.070 Clarence Stone: I was very close to being a 10x developer, like, it’s just I was not good at managing APIs, data structures, or flows, like, I just know they exist, right? To me, like, I say, if you give me an API, I will make magic happen for you on the front end.
247 00:23:25.260 ⇒ 00:23:35.879 Clarence Stone: I don’t care what you do back there, though. Like, I don’t want to hear it, like, if you can’t give me the API, it can’t happen on the front end. That’s just my rules, right? So… but then, eventually, I got mad.
248 00:23:36.310 ⇒ 00:23:38.810 Clarence Stone: I was like, it can’t be that hard.
249 00:23:39.700 ⇒ 00:23:44.249 Clarence Stone: Like, dude, I am literally creating somebody’s dream on a front end.
250 00:23:44.570 ⇒ 00:23:50.000 Clarence Stone: You can’t tell me that you can’t do those calculations on the backend. So I started learning how to do it.
251 00:23:51.110 ⇒ 00:23:54.680 Clarence Stone: So, I have… I would say, like, you know, maybe I’m a…
252 00:23:55.260 ⇒ 00:23:57.390 Clarence Stone: 8 out of 10 front-end developer.
253 00:23:57.520 ⇒ 00:23:58.440 Clarence Stone: Huh.
254 00:23:59.050 ⇒ 00:24:13.729 Clarence Stone: 4 out of 10 back in developer. And now with AI, I’m 10 out of 10 on all of it. Like, because I understand the leadership aspect of getting all those people to work together. I knew enough to communicate with everybody. So I guess that’s the secret, is, like.
255 00:24:13.730 ⇒ 00:24:28.790 Clarence Stone: Like, today, we don’t… we don’t code, because the harder task is creating a system, an ecosystem, or a strategy, or an architecture. So, everything you saw there came with an architecture first.
256 00:24:29.900 ⇒ 00:24:36.150 Clarence Stone: It’s like, I like this about this, I like this about that, I like this about that. How does that thing work?
257 00:24:37.520 ⇒ 00:24:53.400 Clarence Stone: Right? So I will ask AI a ton of questions, like, how does OpenClaw do this? How does Droid have such a great, like, responsive memory system or guidance research system? How are they tuning the model’s behavior? Because if you look at my model, it’s actually pretty friendly, like, it’s tuned for me.
258 00:24:53.610 ⇒ 00:24:58.110 Clarence Stone: And I understood, like, all the pieces that I want.
259 00:24:59.150 ⇒ 00:25:05.009 Clarence Stone: Right? So then I just gave it to Gemini and said, figure out how to put it all together. What does it look like?
260 00:25:08.360 ⇒ 00:25:18.910 Clarence Stone: Yeah, so I… it’s… I’m sure it’s something you’ll grow into, because you’ll realize, like, hey, somebody did something nice there. How do they do that? Oh, I’m gonna remember and see it next time.
261 00:25:19.550 ⇒ 00:25:23.239 Brylle Girang: Yeah, this is really helpful. You, you are an inspiration, Harry.
262 00:25:23.240 ⇒ 00:25:23.880 Clarence Stone: Thank you.
263 00:25:23.880 ⇒ 00:25:25.970 Brylle Girang: This is amazing.
264 00:25:26.110 ⇒ 00:25:35.360 Clarence Stone: Yeah, so next steps for me… Yeah, yeah, I still have time. Next steps for me, I’m actually gonna patch this up and actually put it in a repo, so that you can play around with it, too.
265 00:25:35.500 ⇒ 00:25:37.550 Brylle Girang: Okay, perfect, gotcha.
266 00:25:37.780 ⇒ 00:25:48.650 Brylle Girang: I will try… I will try it out, Terrence. I’m really excited. So, last thing that I want to talk about, and the main reason why I wanted to… to communicate with you, really, is that I know that you…
267 00:25:48.940 ⇒ 00:25:53.920 Brylle Girang: are one of the brains that helped build my role here in Brainforge.
268 00:25:54.300 ⇒ 00:26:00.689 Brylle Girang: And I want to hear some feedback from you. I want to know about what your…
269 00:26:01.220 ⇒ 00:26:08.770 Brylle Girang: What do you think my end game will be for the team and for the company, so… Your thoughts?
270 00:26:09.160 ⇒ 00:26:15.560 Clarence Stone: Yeah, okay, let me put it this way. I don’t…
271 00:26:17.900 ⇒ 00:26:28.329 Clarence Stone: And maybe you’re gonna say this is rare. I don’t look at someone and say, this person is gonna be this in 5 years, 10 years, or next year.
272 00:26:28.860 ⇒ 00:26:32.050 Clarence Stone: I just can see all of their potential.
273 00:26:33.500 ⇒ 00:26:55.190 Clarence Stone: Right? And what they choose to do with their potential, I mean, sometimes I will just need them to use their potential on one thing to make the job work, so I’ll say, hey, I know you’re good at this, like, maybe you don’t like it, I don’t care, we need to do it, right? But, I don’t really, like, I’m not going to give you guidance on what your future dreams should be. I think your dreams should be your dreams, but I can explain to you how I…
274 00:26:55.420 ⇒ 00:26:56.970 Clarence Stone: Made this program.
275 00:26:57.250 ⇒ 00:26:58.700 Clarence Stone: In my life.
276 00:26:58.960 ⇒ 00:27:08.650 Clarence Stone: All the amazing things that happened came from having mentors that would spend time with me, even though, like, they were busy or they had other things to do.
277 00:27:08.870 ⇒ 00:27:20.179 Clarence Stone: Right? I would have never been a very talented front-end developer UX designer if it wasn’t for, you know… like, if you remember when Microsoft… so the Microsoft redesign that just happened?
278 00:27:20.400 ⇒ 00:27:26.390 Clarence Stone: That designer was the one that trained my boss, who taught me.
279 00:27:28.070 ⇒ 00:27:34.739 Clarence Stone: Right? So I’m one step away from all of it, but it was because, like, you know, he was taught a certain way.
280 00:27:35.340 ⇒ 00:27:42.540 Clarence Stone: Right? He’s like, no, you can’t just be a UX designer, you still need to code. Actually, when you’re UX designing, you see the HTML.
281 00:27:44.150 ⇒ 00:27:53.300 Clarence Stone: Yeah, he’ll point at it and say, is that a div, an HTML, a section, and a side? You know, like, and then I make the design, and he’s like, okay, write it all out in HTML.
282 00:27:55.100 ⇒ 00:28:03.479 Clarence Stone: Right? So I was, like, these are great mentors that didn’t just say, like, oh, go and do this. It’s they poured time in to teach me.
283 00:28:03.610 ⇒ 00:28:05.390 Clarence Stone: So I… that’s what I told Utang.
284 00:28:05.730 ⇒ 00:28:12.819 Clarence Stone: The whole, I think, aspiration of this strategy is, this talent set, it’s so hard.
285 00:28:12.920 ⇒ 00:28:14.280 Clarence Stone: It’s so hard.
286 00:28:14.810 ⇒ 00:28:17.329 Clarence Stone: I’ve tried to teach a lot of people this stuff.
287 00:28:18.140 ⇒ 00:28:23.189 Clarence Stone: And I don’t know what else I can tell some people that, like, it…
288 00:28:23.550 ⇒ 00:28:28.410 Clarence Stone: To me, it comes very naturally. Once it clicks, it starts to click, and it becomes a snowball, right?
289 00:28:28.550 ⇒ 00:28:37.759 Clarence Stone: But unless they sit next to me, or I speak to them, like, you know, every hour of the day, there’s no way that I’m going to be able to teach them what I know.
290 00:28:38.620 ⇒ 00:28:47.249 Clarence Stone: Right. And, you know, the company in which, like, really inspired me to do it this way was Ernst & Young.
291 00:28:47.340 ⇒ 00:29:01.589 Clarence Stone: Ernst & Young is a really difficult company to be at. Like, you will get fired whenever, like, and people are always… you have two paths. You can be nervous, or you can take it as a challenge and say, I’m gonna do what I want, you can go ahead and try and fire me.
292 00:29:03.080 ⇒ 00:29:13.179 Clarence Stone: Right. And, I… I was never, like… like, a lot of those people, they start in consulting and they move up, right? I got hired in the middle.
293 00:29:13.320 ⇒ 00:29:18.960 Clarence Stone: And I didn’t understand what it was like. And I didn’t like it, and it was a year and a half in, I was gonna quit.
294 00:29:19.940 ⇒ 00:29:23.830 Clarence Stone: And there was a partner that said, hey, come with me, we’re gonna do this.
295 00:29:24.680 ⇒ 00:29:33.000 Clarence Stone: Right? And he goes, like, hey, the partner wants you to make a data structure for this and make a proof of concept for that. Put it on the slide deck. I said, okay.
296 00:29:33.090 ⇒ 00:29:49.799 Clarence Stone: And he’s like, oh, that’s not good, and he just rips it apart, and he’s like, this is how it should be done. Okay, now you have 30 minutes. We’re gonna talk to the partner in 30 minutes. I was like, holy shit! Right? And I was like, okay, so I’m, like, scrambling, I’m getting down, and then, like, we get on the screen, it’s like, Clarence is gonna explain it to you.
297 00:29:52.170 ⇒ 00:30:05.300 Clarence Stone: Right? So in any of these moments, like, you can say, this guy’s being mean to me, he’s abusing me, like, and a lot of people say that. No, he was making me better, because after I finished that presentation, he’s like, good job, here are the things that we can do better next time.
298 00:30:06.380 ⇒ 00:30:13.189 Clarence Stone: And let me show you what I did in that moment. So he brings up some slides. And literally, he had, like, 20 minutes before another meeting.
299 00:30:13.340 ⇒ 00:30:14.359 Clarence Stone: And he’s gone.
300 00:30:15.760 ⇒ 00:30:20.080 Clarence Stone: Right? And then he pulls me in the next day, he’s like, I need you to work on this, this, and this, and this.
301 00:30:21.060 ⇒ 00:30:24.299 Clarence Stone: I’m like, okay. And he’s like,
302 00:30:24.340 ⇒ 00:30:34.079 Clarence Stone: you can go out and find whatever help you need. Like, he gave me an opportunity to just pull whoever I need help from. And that’s when I started to learn, like, people don’t have this type of energy.
303 00:30:34.080 ⇒ 00:30:51.249 Clarence Stone: And eventually he developed me to, you know, run my own, engagements, to sell my own products. Like, the way I’m talking right now is because he said one day to me, he’s like, you built this thing, right? It’s pretty cool. Microsoft said that you can announce it on stage.
304 00:30:51.690 ⇒ 00:30:54.169 Clarence Stone: So I presented at Microsoft on stage.
305 00:30:56.770 ⇒ 00:31:03.689 Clarence Stone: Right? And he’s like, this is an opportunity, remember that you worked for this, and now your job is to make sure someone else can do that too.
306 00:31:05.000 ⇒ 00:31:10.840 Clarence Stone: Right? So eventually, he started to explain to me that, like, Like, consultancies are…
307 00:31:11.000 ⇒ 00:31:18.159 Clarence Stone: Like, developing people. It’s an apprenticeship. You’re growing people. And not everybody wants to grow, they want to stay in their box.
308 00:31:18.490 ⇒ 00:31:38.030 Clarence Stone: Right? But when you grow people, they become exponentially more powerful. And it takes time, though, it takes energy. I mean, him and I would fight, right? I would be like, dude, this is stupid, I want to do this. Like, I’m up at 9pm making slide decks for you, or, like, making demos for you, and, like, you’re presenting it and making all the money, right? Like…
309 00:31:38.030 ⇒ 00:31:40.749 Clarence Stone: But, at the end of the day, like.
310 00:31:40.750 ⇒ 00:31:49.180 Clarence Stone: when I became a managing director, he looked around, he turned around to me, he said, okay, here’s how it works. We need to make money. How are we gonna make money?
311 00:31:50.540 ⇒ 00:31:57.039 Clarence Stone: And I was like, what? He’s like, I just taught you for the last year and a half how to make money. How would you make money?
312 00:31:57.590 ⇒ 00:32:05.480 Clarence Stone: That was the question. And I, like, over the weekend, came up with an entire slide deck and a proposal to create an AI team at EY.
313 00:32:06.550 ⇒ 00:32:09.559 Clarence Stone: Right? And he said, approved, you’re a managing director, go.
314 00:32:11.630 ⇒ 00:32:13.480 Clarence Stone: Right? So that’s what I mean, like.
315 00:32:14.380 ⇒ 00:32:16.949 Clarence Stone: he took me through every step that I needed.
316 00:32:17.410 ⇒ 00:32:20.869 Clarence Stone: It wasn’t kind, but it was good mentorship.
317 00:32:21.460 ⇒ 00:32:33.000 Clarence Stone: Right? And, like, unless I got to sit with him in the office when he was making decisions, or see how he interacts in the meeting, or see how he talks to clients, right? I never would have been able to do this.
318 00:32:34.110 ⇒ 00:32:42.499 Clarence Stone: Right? So I turned around to him before I left, I’m like, hey… and by the way, he leads the entire practice now, at EY. So he’s the senior partner.
319 00:32:42.740 ⇒ 00:32:45.179 Clarence Stone: And before I left, I said, you changed my life!
320 00:32:45.200 ⇒ 00:33:02.410 Clarence Stone: like, you allowed me to see things I never would have, and, like, you’ll always be my friend, like, that’s just, like, I think that, you know, there’s more opportunity here that, like, I can’t do with you. He’s like, my feelings are hurt, but I agree. And so… so that’s the story I told Utam, and I said, like.
321 00:33:02.410 ⇒ 00:33:14.590 Clarence Stone: The… your best employees now are going to be, like, one of two options. One is, like, you try to feel that you’re lucky and you find the perfect one in the market. How many interviews does that take?
322 00:33:15.160 ⇒ 00:33:24.290 Clarence Stone: Right? Or number two, you find somebody who is really interested in doing this, is gonna actually work nonstop, work harder than you.
323 00:33:24.570 ⇒ 00:33:28.059 Clarence Stone: Uten didn’t meet somebody that worked harder than him until he met me.
324 00:33:29.620 ⇒ 00:33:34.589 Clarence Stone: I sent him this application, I wrapped it in an app wrapper, 4AM last night.
325 00:33:37.490 ⇒ 00:33:38.650 Clarence Stone: Right? Like…
326 00:33:38.890 ⇒ 00:33:45.449 Clarence Stone: If you have the drive, you will get everything, but you need somebody to come and give you the opportunity.
327 00:33:45.560 ⇒ 00:34:04.920 Clarence Stone: Right? To say, like, hey, B, I’ve got an empty bucket of tokens, you can use them, right? And a bunch of real use cases for you to try it on, and, you know, a bunch of people who will test it for you and tell you how good or bad your development is, right? And, you know, here’s some other problems that we need you to help solve. That’s what you’re seeing right now.
328 00:34:04.920 ⇒ 00:34:13.749 Clarence Stone: Right? Like, hey, like, at the beginning, Utama’s like, you’re gonna build this exactly this way, and now he’s slowly saying, okay, now figure this out.
329 00:34:14.570 ⇒ 00:34:18.559 Clarence Stone: Right? Now, here’s just the problem. Tell me how you will fix it.
330 00:34:19.070 ⇒ 00:34:19.600 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
331 00:34:19.600 ⇒ 00:34:24.939 Clarence Stone: Right? It gets higher and higher and higher, but, like, it’s to develop people to be able to do that.
332 00:34:30.300 ⇒ 00:34:32.400 Brylle Girang: That makes a whole lot of sense.
333 00:34:32.409 ⇒ 00:34:33.269 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
334 00:34:33.270 ⇒ 00:34:36.709 Brylle Girang: Did it explain the role to me, but that makes a whole lot of sense.
335 00:34:36.710 ⇒ 00:34:39.180 Clarence Stone: Right? So, yeah, I mean, like.
336 00:34:40.050 ⇒ 00:34:48.149 Clarence Stone: Elon Musk said this, actually, and I actually really love it. He said, there’s only two roles in a company that are required.
337 00:34:49.260 ⇒ 00:34:53.620 Clarence Stone: And that’s president and secretary. Every other role is made up.
338 00:34:56.960 ⇒ 00:35:04.360 Clarence Stone: So, like, B, your future, what’s next for you, I think you need to start thinking about, what did you enjoy doing?
339 00:35:04.360 ⇒ 00:35:06.400 Brylle Girang: Yeah. What do you want to try doing?
340 00:35:06.820 ⇒ 00:35:30.020 Clarence Stone: Right? Because there’s so much more of the business that, like, you haven’t had a chance to explore, because you’re working on building something valuable here. Do you want to explore other parts of that business? Do you want to continue automating and growing this? Do you want to, you know, shadow, you know, us when we do sales? You know, you see me, I’m in my business, I do this, like, is this the reason why I can’t talk to you between 9 to 5 now?
341 00:35:30.020 ⇒ 00:35:37.559 Clarence Stone: Because, like, I just… I told you, Tom, I’m so sick of, like, not charging, too much, like, I want more clients, I want to get more, and I’m just…
342 00:35:37.560 ⇒ 00:35:40.030 Clarence Stone: I’m hitting everybody in my phone book.
343 00:35:40.490 ⇒ 00:35:41.699 Clarence Stone: All the time now.
344 00:35:41.960 ⇒ 00:35:47.229 Clarence Stone: So, we’re gonna get big deals, we’re gonna win. And to do that, that means that I have to code at night.
345 00:35:47.440 ⇒ 00:35:52.060 Clarence Stone: If that means I stay up till 4AM, it is what it is. The work is the work, it doesn’t go away.
346 00:35:55.520 ⇒ 00:36:05.100 Clarence Stone: Yeah, so, it’s hard to hire somebody and say, this is our mentality, you need to do it too, but if we give you a little bit at a time.
347 00:36:05.240 ⇒ 00:36:11.000 Clarence Stone: Maybe you’ll start to see that we’re not doing this to be jerks, it’s just a way of life for us.
348 00:36:11.000 ⇒ 00:36:12.780 Brylle Girang: Yeah, yeah.
349 00:36:13.340 ⇒ 00:36:14.000 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
350 00:36:14.270 ⇒ 00:36:15.380 Clarence Stone: Does that make sense?
351 00:36:15.810 ⇒ 00:36:22.430 Brylle Girang: It does make sense, totally. Greatness doesn’t come with… complacency, right?
352 00:36:23.010 ⇒ 00:36:23.500 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
353 00:36:23.500 ⇒ 00:36:25.229 Brylle Girang: It’s amazing, really amazing.
354 00:36:25.230 ⇒ 00:36:42.270 Clarence Stone: So, like, and what I can tell you is that to be a great winner, it’s not just, like, the things that you can build, but also the things that you can understand from people when they say things to you, or how you interpret it and actually become a part of a solution.
355 00:36:42.270 ⇒ 00:36:43.860 Clarence Stone: Right? So,
356 00:36:43.860 ⇒ 00:37:02.529 Clarence Stone: I remember very vividly, I was in this boardroom, and this partner was… his, like, face was red. He’s like, why, you know, were these backend integrations messed up? Why were they messed up for two weeks? The client is really pissed off. Why did none of you guys catch this? Who was responsible for it? And nobody answered.
357 00:37:03.980 ⇒ 00:37:07.279 Clarence Stone: He’s like, will someone answer? Anybody? Somewhere?
358 00:37:07.880 ⇒ 00:37:11.400 Clarence Stone: Right? And… and what I…
359 00:37:11.600 ⇒ 00:37:22.800 Clarence Stone: like, I guess in my maturity of, like, being in a boardroom for so long, I was like, he’s not asking for who is to blame. He’s asking for who’s going to solve the problem for him.
360 00:37:23.750 ⇒ 00:37:36.250 Clarence Stone: Right, and I think once you think about it this way, and even in your normal life, a lot of people will explicitly tell you what their problems are. They might not explicitly tell you how to solve it, how they want them solved, because they don’t even know.
361 00:37:36.510 ⇒ 00:37:37.080 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
362 00:37:37.320 ⇒ 00:37:38.769 Clarence Stone: They’re complex problems.
363 00:37:39.170 ⇒ 00:37:46.250 Clarence Stone: Right? So, if you hear Utam say, oh, man, the EPs are slow, or their documents aren’t up to date, say, hey.
364 00:37:46.500 ⇒ 00:38:05.240 Clarence Stone: Bhutam, I heard yesterday that you said EPs are slow, documents are not up to date, I came up with some automation ideas, I reviewed the processes with Rico, because Rico’s my boy, right? And I proposed this process change, this new piece of technology, what do you think?
365 00:38:07.310 ⇒ 00:38:09.430 Clarence Stone: You will be a different beast.
366 00:38:09.620 ⇒ 00:38:10.780 Clarence Stone: At that point.
367 00:38:11.150 ⇒ 00:38:15.449 Clarence Stone: Right? Because… Most people just show up and say, tell me what to do.
368 00:38:16.470 ⇒ 00:38:21.179 Clarence Stone: If you are actively solving a problem, you now become a part of the company.
369 00:38:23.470 ⇒ 00:38:40.539 Clarence Stone: Right. Like, dude, I haven’t been on Brain Forge, like, for the last 3 days, because I’ve been doing all this shit, and people still reach out to me, right? Like, they still know that, like, they can reach out, they ask questions about the company. I’m always happy to do it, but, like, it makes me happy, because that means that I’ve made a good enough
370 00:38:40.630 ⇒ 00:38:47.019 Clarence Stone: contribution to help solving their problems, right? They, you know, if I didn’t solve people’s problems, they would never call me anyway.
371 00:38:47.190 ⇒ 00:38:48.030 Clarence Stone: Right?
372 00:38:49.130 ⇒ 00:38:53.250 Clarence Stone: So, like, when… I’ll give you the UTAM example, he’s like, hey,
373 00:38:54.090 ⇒ 00:38:57.719 Clarence Stone: you know, I want to try this mentorship thing. How does it work?
374 00:38:59.120 ⇒ 00:39:05.230 Clarence Stone: Right? So I asked him, like, a bunch of questions, and I said, okay. And then, in an hour, I gave him the plan.
375 00:39:07.300 ⇒ 00:39:13.759 Clarence Stone: I just took all of that context into AI, reread the plan, tweaked some things, and said, yeah, this is what we talked about, here you go.
376 00:39:14.690 ⇒ 00:39:17.979 Clarence Stone: Who in this company is capable of doing that for him?
377 00:39:23.930 ⇒ 00:39:26.130 Clarence Stone: Have you seen it yet? You’ve shadowed him?
378 00:39:26.480 ⇒ 00:39:29.099 Clarence Stone: That’s the problem. That’s what he struggles with.
379 00:39:30.920 ⇒ 00:39:48.840 Clarence Stone: Right? And it is in our hopes that you might be that person, right? And that we can give you enough support, enough growth, enough of our energy to, you know, share, you know, our experiences, what we’re building, what we’re doing, our perspectives, so that you can say, okay, I understand what
380 00:39:48.840 ⇒ 00:39:51.260 Clarence Stone: what needs to be done? No. I’ll just do it.
381 00:39:52.200 ⇒ 00:39:58.180 Clarence Stone: Right. Having those types of proactive members, I don’t know if you could hire that kind of talent.
382 00:39:58.520 ⇒ 00:40:04.849 Clarence Stone: You really need somebody hungry like you, who’s young enough, that has the drive to want to do it.
383 00:40:05.130 ⇒ 00:40:06.110 Clarence Stone: to do it.
384 00:40:07.920 ⇒ 00:40:15.280 Clarence Stone: Because, I mean, think about me at EY. My peers were probably 7 or 8 years older than me. They had families, they had kids.
385 00:40:16.310 ⇒ 00:40:19.190 Clarence Stone: At 8 o’clock, sorry, 6 o’clock, they go home.
386 00:40:20.000 ⇒ 00:40:21.749 Clarence Stone: No, I don’t stop working.
387 00:40:22.820 ⇒ 00:40:33.190 Clarence Stone: Right? I’m doing way more things than them, and I get promoted way faster than them, right? So, yeah, I mean, if you’re at any point feeling like.
388 00:40:33.630 ⇒ 00:40:41.310 Clarence Stone: You know, you’re… you’re not kind of up to things, like, you are in, like, the summation of the things that you do in your free time, too.
389 00:40:42.620 ⇒ 00:40:57.050 Clarence Stone: Right? And that doesn’t mean you have to stay in front of the computer, like, sometimes, like, learning how to learn things, right? Like, cooking for me is one of my favorite things. Utam loves cooking. Probably talked to you about cooking. But if you relate it to a problem that you have.
390 00:40:57.590 ⇒ 00:40:58.750 Clarence Stone: encoding.
391 00:40:59.430 ⇒ 00:41:05.410 Clarence Stone: It might actually unlock a problem that, you know, solve a problem that you were facing in coding.
392 00:41:05.940 ⇒ 00:41:12.310 Clarence Stone: Right. So, my answer to all of this is, I think, true… I’m almost certain
393 00:41:12.770 ⇒ 00:41:18.210 Clarence Stone: Somebody’s… somebody smart is gonna say this again, you’re gonna remember that Clarence said it first, right?
394 00:41:18.610 ⇒ 00:41:22.460 Clarence Stone: in this AI era, the only winners
395 00:41:22.590 ⇒ 00:41:27.820 Clarence Stone: In this whole era will be people who understand ecosystem and architecture.
396 00:41:29.570 ⇒ 00:41:34.559 Clarence Stone: As in, this is how the world works. If I pull this string, what happens here?
397 00:41:35.140 ⇒ 00:41:46.570 Clarence Stone: Will it go up? I don’t know, I think so, right? That’s what most business people say. But I go, the laws of physics, based on how the environment and nature works, is that it will go up, and I know that.
398 00:41:47.180 ⇒ 00:42:00.259 Clarence Stone: So then now I have an entire system in my mind, and when I see a ecosystem like biology, or a process-based thing like cooking, or a, you know, codebase and architecture, is all the same to me.
399 00:42:00.680 ⇒ 00:42:02.860 Clarence Stone: And now the coding layer is gone.
400 00:42:03.950 ⇒ 00:42:11.039 Clarence Stone: And I’m a monster because of it. I don’t have to… that delay from concept to execution is gone.
401 00:42:11.310 ⇒ 00:42:14.970 Clarence Stone: All I have to do is talk about the architecture I see in my head.
402 00:42:15.860 ⇒ 00:42:22.389 Clarence Stone: And I think people who can elevate to that layer are going to really, really win here.
403 00:42:23.510 ⇒ 00:42:30.660 Clarence Stone: Right? Because, like, I’ll one day, this is a much longer conversation, explain to you how I made the project teams.
404 00:42:31.070 ⇒ 00:42:33.920 Clarence Stone: Because it’s a little ecosystem in itself.
405 00:42:34.240 ⇒ 00:42:34.790 Brylle Girang: Yep.
406 00:42:35.180 ⇒ 00:42:43.609 Clarence Stone: And it’s very much like organizational design, which is no different than architectural design now, or maybe agent-to-agent design now.
407 00:42:44.270 ⇒ 00:42:50.019 Clarence Stone: Because, you know, I implore you to read that document again, and pretend that every single role is an agent.
408 00:42:50.340 ⇒ 00:42:52.740 Brylle Girang: Yeah. And you’re gonna see what I see.
409 00:42:53.090 ⇒ 00:42:53.630 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
410 00:42:55.690 ⇒ 00:43:03.379 Clarence Stone: Yeah, so, you know, people are like, oh, where’s the talent gonna be? I already know what it is. Yeah. It’s just some thinkers.
411 00:43:05.020 ⇒ 00:43:08.169 Brylle Girang: I have a talking point for our next meeting.
412 00:43:08.740 ⇒ 00:43:11.590 Brylle Girang: Thank you so much, Clarence.
413 00:43:11.970 ⇒ 00:43:12.380 Clarence Stone: Cool.
414 00:43:12.380 ⇒ 00:43:17.690 Brylle Girang: Amazing, and, you know, This is… this is perfect.
415 00:43:17.930 ⇒ 00:43:22.629 Brylle Girang: I do think that one of the main things that I really want to do is to learn.
416 00:43:23.120 ⇒ 00:43:27.869 Brylle Girang: And one of the main things why I really wanted to get into Brain Forge is that
417 00:43:28.070 ⇒ 00:43:33.360 Brylle Girang: I don’t know shit about data architecture.
418 00:43:33.360 ⇒ 00:43:48.120 Brylle Girang: But I know that it’s important, I don’t know anything about it. With my first two weeks, I have been reading all the messages, trying to digest everything that I can. I don’t know the words, I don’t know the jargons, but…
419 00:43:48.620 ⇒ 00:43:52.850 Brylle Girang: I can see how people are working, I can see how important it is, and…
420 00:43:53.310 ⇒ 00:44:02.299 Clarence Stone: So I had a few team members like you, and one of my favorite parts of working with talented people like you… I still, like, this was…
421 00:44:03.140 ⇒ 00:44:05.330 Clarence Stone: Almost 15 years ago, B.
422 00:44:05.450 ⇒ 00:44:09.260 Clarence Stone: But I remember it. I was… the first year I was a PM,
423 00:44:09.450 ⇒ 00:44:14.040 Clarence Stone: And I gave… I went to this brand new hire. He just got out of…
424 00:44:14.160 ⇒ 00:44:16.200 Clarence Stone: I don’t think he even graduated college.
425 00:44:17.410 ⇒ 00:44:24.919 Clarence Stone: And… and I was like, hey, we’re switching the codebase from Angular to React.
426 00:44:26.080 ⇒ 00:44:31.660 Clarence Stone: And he’s like… and the… and Jazz, his name was Jazz. Jazz looks at me and says.
427 00:44:32.300 ⇒ 00:44:35.149 Clarence Stone: Can you get me a book on React?
428 00:44:37.190 ⇒ 00:44:42.269 Clarence Stone: I was like, what a weird question. Like, you know, back in the day, we didn’t have all these coding lessons.
429 00:44:42.270 ⇒ 00:44:42.590 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
430 00:44:42.590 ⇒ 00:44:49.110 Clarence Stone: YouTube videos and stuff, right? So… so I went down, so we… I worked in a huge, huge camera store.
431 00:44:49.240 ⇒ 00:44:53.599 Clarence Stone: In Manhattan. So I just walked down and just paid for a book, and I gave it to him.
432 00:44:54.460 ⇒ 00:45:01.099 Clarence Stone: Right? On Monday, He taps me in the shoulder on my desk, and he says, I know Angular now.
433 00:45:01.690 ⇒ 00:45:03.059 Clarence Stone: Can I try?
434 00:45:04.750 ⇒ 00:45:06.520 Clarence Stone: And I said, how do you know it?
435 00:45:06.700 ⇒ 00:45:09.909 Clarence Stone: he’s like, Look in your email, I made an app.
436 00:45:11.830 ⇒ 00:45:12.910 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
437 00:45:14.060 ⇒ 00:45:17.089 Clarence Stone: I think people like that are gonna win, man.
438 00:45:17.560 ⇒ 00:45:23.999 Clarence Stone: Because the distance from idea to execution isn’t even a book anymore, it’s asking a question to an LLM.
439 00:45:24.560 ⇒ 00:45:25.210 Brylle Girang: Yeah.
440 00:45:26.920 ⇒ 00:45:27.710 Clarence Stone: Yeah.
441 00:45:28.280 ⇒ 00:45:29.420 Brylle Girang: Gotcha.
442 00:45:32.500 ⇒ 00:45:38.630 Clarence Stone: Cool! So, how’s everything going? Like, I gave you a lot of heavy things to think about, especially in the morning. It’s 7 AM.
443 00:45:39.340 ⇒ 00:45:45.130 Clarence Stone: to go. But if you ever need anything from me, you know to reach out, right?
444 00:45:45.130 ⇒ 00:45:58.939 Brylle Girang: Yeah, definitely. If possible, Clarence, I want this to be recurring, so I’m going to try and schedule a meeting with you at least weekly, because I also… one of the main things that have helped me was mentorship.
445 00:45:59.050 ⇒ 00:46:02.819 Brylle Girang: And I’m going to treat you and Otam as my primary mentors.
446 00:46:03.470 ⇒ 00:46:12.579 Clarence Stone: Sure, absolutely. This time works perfect, actually, so if you just want to make it reoccurring, if it’s too early, like, you let me know, we’ll figure out, I’ll look at my calendar and we’ll see.
447 00:46:12.580 ⇒ 00:46:13.020 Brylle Girang: It’s okay.
448 00:46:13.490 ⇒ 00:46:14.270 Clarence Stone: Gotcha.
449 00:46:14.270 ⇒ 00:46:17.119 Brylle Girang: Thank you so much, Clarence. This is amazing.
450 00:46:17.370 ⇒ 00:46:17.780 Brylle Girang: Bye-bye.
451 00:46:17.780 ⇒ 00:46:19.200 Clarence Stone: Yep, bye.