Talk
Your Hoard of AI Minion Agents
Like a Roomba for your code AI Agents coordinate to accomplish chores that you are both perfectly capable of, but busy doing other things so they will work 24 hours a day 7 days a week getting it done for you. We are going to talk about what an "ai agent" is today, go beyond the hype, and explore some practical (and fun!) ways you can start implementing them yourself today without a lot of hassle.
Bio
crafting useful education products at badass.dev working on Course Builder coursebuilder.dev, a boutique CMS
building egghead.io since 2013
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Interview
What is up, everybody? Hey, Joel, how are you doing? I'm doing great, how are you doing? Awesome, you're very enthusiastic, I love it. It was a Tony the Tiger impersonation. Great, Joel, I'm so happy to have you speaking at Epic Web Conf coming right up
in just like two months from now in Salt Lake City. It's gonna be so sick. This is year two. You are a co-organizer of this conference. I am. So yeah, I'm just really grateful to you for helping make this a reality. I definitely, I wouldn't do this without you
if you weren't a part of it. Same. So I can't make it happen. So yeah, thank you for making this happen, taking care of the website and everything too. So yeah, let's just, the purpose of this is just for people to get to know you a little bit
ahead of your talk and kind of get an intro to your talk. So why don't you give us an intro to yourself? Well, my name is Joel. I build Egghead.io and I build a nice catalog of other cool sites like Epic Web and Epic React and Total TypeScript and other kind of course-related sites.
And that's what I like doing. I love the platform work and I like building the tooling around that stuff and kind of content management and all those goodies are fun to build. I like to build my own content management system because there's no good ones that I need to build my own. Well, yeah, I don't think we have any CMS sponsors
at the conference yet, but. Oh, nice. Well, yours is great, if you're listening. I actually do, like I love, there's a lot of great content management systems and we've used them and our favorite traditionally has been Sanity and we use that, but then we like got to the point where we had it so dialed in, like how we were using that, that going custom just made sense.
So that's what we've been migrating towards. It's related to the talk too, because it all kind of stems from that. I call it Course Builder and it's just our platform for creating courses and doing all the automations and support and stuff that goes on behind the scenes for any sort of product like that.
Yeah, dude, it is. I've seen the stuff that you've done for Epic Web and Epic React and it's super impressive, very cool stuff. So when I saw your talk proposal, I was like, I've got to get this one in. Well, you had like two or three that were really, really good, but yeah, I definitely wanted to get this one in.
So yeah, actually, let's talk a little bit about it. Can you give us like a quick rundown of what you're thinking about for your talk? So it's about building your own horde of AI minions, basically, and I haven't seen the cartoon. I think I actually might need to see the minions cartoon,
so I can maybe sprinkle in some of that flavor. But the idea to me is, and what I'm up to personally, is building kind of a very personal app for myself. It's at joelfit.app and I'm adding these automations in
that help me organize my personal health and fitness and it's using AI behind the scenes and agents, to some extent, they're basically, like it's send a command to an LLM and there's a LLM router in the background and decides which of these processes or workflows should kick off.
And it's really neat because, I don't know, they can kind of work for you in the, they can make these small decisions while also keeping it contained. So it doesn't run amok and you're not, like I'm not gonna give it my credit card numbers. But you can do all these cool things with these workflows
and it extends beyond, like I'm doing it for, like my current kind of hobby app is around myself, but that then applies to all sorts of professional circumstances or workflows or processes that we have in our day-to-day lives as developers and then beyond that. Because I talk to people all the time
that are running into, they would like to use these things but they're difficult and sometimes a little opaque to get started. So my goal is with this talk is just to get people enthusiastic and show them how to get started and how we've been using this stuff kind of, because we all are aware of the hype around like agents
and this terminology. But it's really practical and I think approachable for most people that develop software to start playing with this and get a lot of utility out of it. Yeah, yeah, so you're like peeling back the layers so that it's less magical and more practical
and like this is something that you can do sort of thing. Yeah, and you know, laid out in a way that it's like, oh, okay, well, I'd like to describe it as a new kind of superpower in your arsenal. You know, we get these, there's been a lot of paradigm shifting superpowers coming at us, I think,
and rapid waves lately. You know, like from the cursor IDE, which I love and that's using that same principle, right? Like when you ask the, you know, AI IDE to build something for you, it's effectively doing this workflow and process and examining files and making decisions
and, you know, like asking you if you want to do the next step as you flow through it. So kind of the same thing just applied into different contexts. Hmm, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that a lot. It sounded like you said something about an AI router, which sounds kind of interesting.
So yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing your talk. So at Epic Web Conf, like, in your mind, what is the real benefit to going to a conference? Because the education is available.
We're definitely gonna have the like recordings of the talks available online. So somebody watching this right now may be deciding like, oh, that sounds like a cool talk. I can't wait to watch the video. Why should they come in person? So for me, and I really enjoy going to conferences and especially ones that are put together
in a way that respects the hallway track as much as the, you know, like the kind of the presentation side of it. And that's important because you're getting these new ideas, right? Like people are making presentations and presenting ideas. And then you have this opportunity to then discuss it and see what other people are doing
and see what people, you know, like what kind of problems they're dealing with on their job and, you know, how that relates to yours and what kind of new stuff they're using. And just that sharing of ideas in the context of, you know, also a shared learning experience. I think really, you know, I've made so many connections and come out with just so many ideas about,
that I could take home and start implementing and be enthusiastic about at work in both, you know, this is, you know, like, what do you do for fun programming? What's your hobbies programming? Like, I still feel that way and I love it a lot. And being in that like immersive experience really means a lot to me. And then the connections you make,
cause you know, I work remotely and I love it. And I don't want to go back to the office, but every now and then I want to just be surrounded by other people that are enthusiastic about the work that we do. And that's just a really good opportunity. It's hard to simulate online. Like I love, you know, I'm highly online and I love that,
but, you know, like taking that break and slowing it down and having those, you know, like talking to people and not putting it on 2X and actually listening and also sharing, like that's something that I hold pretty dear and I love doing it.
And yeah, I'm excited to see everybody in Salt Lake City. Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And it's, as more and more of our lives become controlled by computers or like run by the machine, it's nice to do something that the machine can't do.
And that is like connect with humans in a true way. So- Me and Claude are tight. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, for real though, you could definitely like, there are the AI girlfriend apps and all of that stuff, but yeah, there's just something special
about having that human connection. And that's what we're, that's the whole reason we're doing the conference. We could easily just put these videos online, but we want people to come together. It costs a lot more, it takes a lot more effort and everything to get people together, but like that's where the real value lies, is right there.
I had so many jokes that just ran through my head. I was just like, uh, uh, I'm not gonna say it. No, yeah, AI girlfriend. I agree, I'm extremely bullish on human relationships and being, you know, like proximity is great. Like working remotely, fantastic. I'm not gonna trade that in for anything,
but then also like, how do I get that? And I've been doing this a long time and I've been going to conferences for a long time and I have, you know, it's like jobs and opportunity and friendships and, you know, professional knowledge that has come from going to conferences.
I don't think I can, it's just been impactful for me. For sure. Yeah, well, I've gotten jobs because of meetups and conferences before. Like it definitely impacted my career. All right, Joel, the last thing I want to know from you is, as we're at the conference, you're standing around, somebody wants to come up and meet you and talk with you.
What is, what are some things that they could bring up that would be really interesting for you to talk about? So I've been on a, like a health and nutrition and general fitness kick, and that's what I'm building my little AI-fueled app about, and I'll talk about that for days if you want to chat about that.
Sweet, yeah, sounds good. Let's talk about health. I started working out for the first time actively, so yeah. Love to hear it. Yeah, let's chat. All right, hey, thanks so much, Joel. Thanks, everybody, for watching. We'll see you at the conference in March. See you soon.
