Do 60-Minute Coding Tasks in 60 Seconds—With AI - Ep. 41 with Steve Krouse

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Dec 4, 2024

Steve Krouse, co-founder and CEO of Val Town, discusses the rapid evolution of coding with AI, showcasing how a task now takes just 60 seconds instead of 60 minutes. He explains how Townie, Val Town’s AI assistant, generated an app in real-time during their chat. The conversation dives into the rise of non-technical developers, programming's transformative effect on thinking, and how small engineering teams can drive innovation. Krouse also shares insights on adapting startup strategies in a competitive AI landscape.

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INSIGHT

Programming Rewires Thinking

Steve believes programming can fundamentally rewire your thinking processes.
Val Town, his social coding site, reflects his long-standing interest in programming languages' impact on cognition.

ANECDOTE

Coding Journey and Seymour Papert

Steve's coding journey began with a transformative after-school program and continued with a hackathon experience.
Discovering Seymour Papert's work and the Logo programming language deepened his understanding of programming's cognitive impact.

ANECDOTE

Logo and Derivatives

Steve explains how Logo's turtle graphics helped him intuitively grasp the concept of derivatives in math.
He later realized this early programming experience gave him an advantage in understanding complex mathematical ideas.

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Here’s the most compelling benchmark of AI progress:

A task that took 60 minutes a year ago now takes 60 seconds.

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

Steve is the cofounder and CEO of Val Town, a cloud-based platform for developers to write, share, and deploy code directly in the browser. We used Townie, Val Town’s AI assistant, to build an app to keep track of time on the podcast, take notes, and generate questions for the guest.

Townie generated the app even before Steve could finish describing it on the show. As we demo Townie, we get into:

Why Steve believes programming can rewire the way you think
The rise of the non-technical AI developer and what that means for the future of coding
How Townie works under the hood, including the details of the system prompt
How Steve is evolving ValTown’s strategy as AI progress continues to unfold
The power of small, dense engineering teams

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

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Timestamps:

Introduction (00:00:55)
How programming changes the way you think (00:03:24)
Building an app in less than 60 seconds (00:11:22)
How Val Town’s AI assistant works (00:17:19)
Steve’s contrarian take on the non-technical AI programmer (00:23:05)
The nuances of building software that isn’t deterministic (00:33:38)
How to design systems that can capitalize on the next leap in AI (00:39:05)
What gives Val Town a competitive edge in a crowded market (00:40:47)
The power of small, dense engineering teams (00:47:34)
How Steve is positioning Val Town in a strategic niche (00:52:26)

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Steve Krouse: https://stevekrouse.com/, @stevekrouse
Val Town: https://www.val.town/
Townie, the AI assistant integrated into Val Town: https://www.val.town/townie/signup?next=%2Ftownie
Pieces on Val Town’s blog about how the team built Townie: How we built Townie—an app that generates fullstack apps, Building a code-writing robot and keeping it happy
The book by Seymour Papert about how programming changes the way you think: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas