Jarrad Grigg

All right. Hey guys, how you doing?

Yianni

Hey.

Chris

Hey, okay, good. So like I was saying, it’s not really a novel approach at this point, but fairly new for websites. And what we’re doing

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

is, you know, you’ve got the opening eyes web API. It’s pretty Pretty good, but like it’s still finding the top 10 results and then serving up what it finds from those that

Jarrad Grigg

Yep.

Chris

makes sense and matches the search query. what we’re doing instead is taking the entire database from a CMS and continually syncing it and updating it with a vector database so that when you search, it’s got additional context. And then in the CMS, the client has the ability to add supplemental data. And the CMS

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

actually captures

Yianni

Hehehe.

Chris

what queries are coming up as content gaps. So someone asks a question, we’re very explicit about saying, I don’t know. If it doesn’t know, but then we’re capturing that so the client can then go in behind it and add and fill in those data gaps. yeah, yeah. And then

Jarrad Grigg

Yep. Yep. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Like you say, it’s a, yeah, sorry. Keep going.

Chris

relationally speaking, like it’s not just the top 10 results. It’s It’s gonna find everything that’s related and be able to connect all

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

the dots between a case study, a service, a blog post, an article you wrote, you know, like five years ago. All of it comes together

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

into this one cohesive piece. So it’s really cool.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, it

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

is amazing. mean, I’ve been experimenting with that a little bit actually. So that’s hilarious. Something similar

Yianni

Ahem.

Jarrad Grigg

I built to sort of drop in knowledge agent that does the same thing. So the idea is that once you sort of initialize it, detects a stack of the project and then, you know, installs itself into the CMS. So whether it be like payload or WordPress or whatever,

Yianni

Mm.

Jarrad Grigg

and it scrapes the website, but then the same thing again, you can add. additional context so you can give extra URLs or files or whatever. And it does also, you know, record all of the users, you know, searches and stuff. It’s probably similar. Let me show you I’m to show you something.

Yianni

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’d love to see it.

Jarrad Grigg

But I think that the issue that I sort of found with with this sort of stuff was like, I just opened my GPT. All right, you’re get a little sneak peek here of something that I’m whipping together. Okay, you see this?

Yianni

Mmm, hehehehe

Jarrad Grigg

I’ve been playing around with a new version of our website. you know, this is,

Yianni

Is that a live webcam or is that just moving to your mouse?

Jarrad Grigg

no, that’s just fair. And if I click it a few times, kind of shakes his head. I don’t know, I’m just playing around with the effects. But anyway, like the little knowledge agent here. So this is something that I’m just

Yianni

Hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

built, it’s plugged in a payload. So this is basically built on payloads. And like you say, it’s kind of like, let’s see if the API key is still working. It’s not, there you go. It’s not exactly like an original idea now. But I think

Yianni

Right.

Jarrad Grigg

like, this is pretty simple, the way that I’ve

Yianni

Hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

created this and the sort of barriers that I’m hitting are like, right and consistency and performance, you know, I think that’s where I

Yianni

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

was going to turn that off. That’s where things get really tricky now is like, it’s pretty easy. Yeah, yeah. You’re gonna build memory systems

Chris

Yeah. Yeah. That was my next question. Yeah, yeah. I done a ton of testing.

Jarrad Grigg

now. Yeah.

Chris

I tested every inference provider that I could find across every model they had, you know, and where I landed like six months ago was six maybe three months ago. Time moves really fast in this space,

Yianni

Yeah.

Chris

so it’s hard to know. But

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, yeah.

Chris

where I landed was Gemini 3.1 flashlight actually had enough knowledge. It was very fast, and the cost was effective because this is remember it’s gonna be a public-facing website. So there’s gonna

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

be things like rate throttling and all of that involved, but

Jarrad Grigg

Yes.

Chris

You know, it’s gonna be expensive. It’s gonna like it could be expensive to have public querying information. So

Jarrad Grigg

Mm-hmm.

Chris

based on traditional traffic levels and trying to figure out what the monthly cost is gonna be and keeping that down, the the sweet spot is a model that’s smart enough to give high-quality answers. You don’t need

Jarrad Grigg

Yep.

Chris

a frontier model for that, but smart enough. It’s gotta be fast

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Chris

because people attention spans are a thing. And then Ray.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, they don’t want to wait. Yeah, that’s right. It’s going to be faster than navigating.

Yianni

Yeah. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

Yeah.

Chris

Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, cost ultimately at the end of the day is a factor. So finding that sweet spot.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, for sure.

Chris

And I was telling Yanni, I was like, I feel like I’m in a simulation because like last week I was like, I wonder if there’s a new version of Gemini flashlight. And sure enough, like it was like 30 minutes ago Google released Gemini 3.5 flashlight. And I was like,

Jarrad Grigg

Alright.

Chris

What what what is this?

Jarrad Grigg

This pace is crazy.

Chris

But so it’s you

Yianni

so fast.

Chris

know, and it’s it’s faster, it’s smarter, but it’s twice the cost. So that was like a no-go for us. We can’t double the cost.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

And I think, yeah, and the way Chris, and we talked about the way it was built, we made it in a way so that we can switch models easily in the backend and still keep the front end the way we want. And, you know, if another model comes along that’s cheaper, faster, more efficient, like it’s an easy swap for us, you know, easy. Yeah. But it’s not like

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. No lock in. Yeah.

Chris

Yeah.

Yianni

totally locked in where you got to restart from scratch again. So that was a, that was a big feature for us to think about.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, man, that’s a big thing at the moment. A lot of people I’m speaking to. That’s so good. Vendor lock-in is

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

real. But yeah, I’ll touch on that in second, but like what you were saying with, how do you sort of make it performant and cost effective? Yeah, that part I’m still kind of working on. So you’re probably a lot further than me at that, but I’ve been spending

Yianni

Ha ha.

Jarrad Grigg

more time on the memory system piece, like trying to figure out how to make it scrape. reliably, consistently, also prune it as well. So,

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

I’ve been building out a couple of different knowledge space systems for different teams and I’ve got my own and I use that as like a, testing ground for what works and what doesn’t work.

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

and now it’s, it’s a really hard challenge. It’s cause you have to have some sort of machine, like, like you say, we have to run it locally.

Yianni

you

Jarrad Grigg

So the one team we’re working with, have a machine in their office, which I’ve built something that sort of runs, know, cron every hour and it just watches directories and it looks for new files and then it ingests it. And then that gets exposed to an agent in a tool that they’re building with them at the moment. So the whole team can kind of get context across everything. But it’s super challenging to make a performance and… Yeah, the, the, the memory pruning pieces. I’ve just tried the new, things that Claude uses. It’s like dream. If you had the like dream approach. Yeah. I just kind of pilfered that and just gave it a go. It seems to be working well, but I’ve not, I’ve not done anything where if you’re working on a system that needed to serve like, I don’t know, a million hits a month or something, what that would cost. so

Yianni

Right. Right.

Chris

Yeah. Yeah. It scales very quickly. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

And it’s expensive, man. Like using these tools is not cheap. I’m finding that as well. So it’s like, what is it? Codex is like, it’s a chat jibby T app now, but it’s just like this random number generator. You have this like weekly, weekly amount of tokens you’re allowed to use. And it just gets reset all the time. And you’re like,

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

do I have enough or not? Anyway, it’s crazy. Sometimes

Yianni

Which,

Jarrad Grigg

I’ll let, yeah, sorry.

Yianni

I was gonna say, which one are you, are you in cursor? Are you

Jarrad Grigg

Yep.

Yianni

leaning into, yeah, cursor. It seems like that’s what Chris uses and the best one, because it gives you access to all of them. And you’re not like, yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, I use both.

Chris

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

I use cursor and codecs. I’ve stopped using

Yianni

Okay.

Jarrad Grigg

Claude. I just can’t stand the way Claude communicates. It’s probably less a capability thing. Just the way it talks. It’s just like, will you just stop?

Yianni

what it’s response is and yeah.

Chris

Let’s so let’s let’s let’s address the elephant in the room here. Grok 4.5 just like came in and was like, I’m here. Right? Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, man. I love it. I love it. I’ve been using a lot. It’s been sort of a bit of a daily driver and cursor. I sent a post out the other day. It’s like, it reminds me of the field medic. It just it just runs out and goes, What’s wrong with you? Okay, I’ll patch you up. You’re good to go. It just real quick. you, you know.

Yianni

Mmm, mmm, in and out.

Jarrad Grigg

And it’s brilliant. It’s just so fast. It blew me away. But the thing that I found with it is it’ll because it acts like a field medic, it just kind of attaches the thing that you want it to do. And it doesn’t think about all these other things. I found anyway, but then

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

like using because I use codecs as well. Soul is really good. I really like the way it thinks, but it’ll just sit there and just go through every possible thing and just go off on the tangent. It’s like this alternative healer that goes on and tell me about your childhood trauma. And, you know, it

Chris

Overthinking. Yeah. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

just off it goes. And so there’s this like weird, you know, it’s working it out, like what kind of personality or what model is good for what. And that’s why I think, yeah, to your point, my cursor is so great. Cause you can just, hey, ask Sol to do this, you know, and you don’t even need to just do it. I find it a really nifty tool.

Chris

I’ve I’ve found that like my go-to now is using a really strong model for planning and then using something like Rock for execution. And Cursor

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

actually ran a test where they created SQL light from scratch based on just the documentation. They just fed it the documentation

Jarrad Grigg

Well…

Chris

and said go. And they used a combination of using single models and then combinations of models as planners and executors. And they found that they could reduce the cost like crazy if they just did that planning execution combo.

Jarrad Grigg

amazing. What do you what do you do then if you’re doing that sort of stuff? How are you keeping your sort of requirements and sort of tests consistent? Or do you even care? Does it does it even matter?

Chris

Most of so i I guess it depends on the project and what you’re building, but like so I have a go-to tech stack and within that tech stack I’ve got cursor roles files currently that really keep things on Rails. So it’s really hard for the AI to drift off and do unwanted things. so that handles requirements most of the time, but I’m also very you know, I’ve done this for 13 plus years. So I’m very explicit in my prompts. I’m not vague, hardly

Jarrad Grigg

you

Chris

ever. I’m like saying, like, go off and do this with this using this thing, and remember this thing over here, and also this thing needs to be handled in this certain way, and then it goes and does it.

Jarrad Grigg

Yep.

Chris

so I’m I’m really saying, like, hey, build this component. I’m I’m learning. to it’s been a l a journey for me to like learn to be able to like hand off things a little vaguely because I

Jarrad Grigg

Yep. Yep.

Chris

want to have that level of control but also, you know, we just worked on a project where It was smaller, we could move fast. Yami used AI for design. He was using I

Jarrad Grigg

Amazing.

Chris

think pencil or now pin.dev, I think they’re calling themselves,

Jarrad Grigg

Yep.

Chris

to like, you know, go in and like clean up the file, make sure it was like very organized for me. And then I was able to throw templates at at the time, Opus 4.8, and just say like build it. Just go. Here, here’s the Figma MCP, go. And

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Chris

got through eight templates in an hour. Like

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

And the work, it it wasn’t ready, right? I had to go back behind it. but it was like I took a really thoughtful approach to it and it took me a week. Eight templates, like free AI, it would have been like four to six months to build all of that

Jarrad Grigg

I mean, speed. Yeah.

Chris

from hand, just by scratch, like writing every line. So like a week.

Jarrad Grigg

You’ve seen you’re like, can’t. Yeah, I’ve seen a lot. I have to I have to hand off. Yeah.

Chris

Yeah, yeah. And it you know, I don’t know, Yanni, how deep do want to go on stuff?

Jarrad Grigg

you don’t have to talk directly about the client, but like the, the, the, process around design. Yeah. I want to know where you guys are at with that at the moment, but just touching on the dev stuff. Like I had this,

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

I wrote a, I built my own harness, probably two months ago, maybe two, three months ago, I think. because I found that all of these agents were just doing inconsistent work, right? They would just, every time you’d

Yianni

Hmm

Jarrad Grigg

spin up a session, they’d Like, I’ve to get my, I’ve got to get my rules down as you know, you’re saying Chris.

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

so I built this very robust harness where it’s like, no, requirements have to be this way. Then I want people to check the requirements. Then I want you to create all the user stories. Then I want you to create all the tests, you know, the way that all the tests are going to run and everything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so on and so forth.

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

And it works really well, but it takes so long. And so it was brilliant for complex software, like big large scale software. everything would be generated consistently. The work would be great, but it would take forever. And I started to realize that the models were kind of fighting the harness because they were getting a lot smarter and that you don’t need to

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

create a five lens approach anymore. It just does it when you say plan, you know, I don’t need to create a

Yianni

Right.

Jarrad Grigg

separate security agent or a separate UX agent. It just does it. And so I stripped it right out, like 90 % reduction in all of my code and whatever. I got like no different in quality output and like, it was a lot faster. And now I’ve

Yianni

Mmm.

Jarrad Grigg

been experimenting just not doing it at all because these teams like cursor and touch up team, whatever, know, they’re much faster at building this sort of stuff. So I’m

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

finding a really lightweight approach to what is kind of really helping in terms of speed things up. So yeah, interesting.

Chris

Yeah. Yanni, do you want to talk about the embedded stuff or or no?

Yianni

The witch stuff?

Chris

The embedded judgment stuff?

Yianni

like the skill files in Figma kind of thing? Or which thing?

Chris

That and also like the like automated building stuff that we talked about a couple of weeks ago.

Yianni

Yeah, yeah. mean, right now it’s like in design. I think it’s been exciting because, you know, we’re working with Chris. We’ve been building sites for 15 years. We kind of know the structure we want and the efficiencies that we can get with AI. So it’s a lot of like, how do we just dial all this in just so that we can, you know, save some time in certain areas? Like for me

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

in design, like I want to stay in the creative. I want to like you know, work on layouts, look at the type, look at the colors, like, and work on the visuals. And I don’t really want to set the variables in Figma and manually go through and set all the type styles and, you know, make sure there’s mobile variants of everything. Like that stuff to me is more just like the tedious, like it needs to get done, but not the best use of my time, I think. So

Jarrad Grigg

Mm.

Yianni

it’s been great for me to leverage AI in. Figma or using other apps like pen.dev where it’s like, all right, I’ve done the messy creative work. have the base level here. Like maybe this is the homepage design and the type now I’ll prompt AI to, you know, go through and audit the system, make sure everything has a type style set to it, make sure they’re color variables. And I work closely with Chris to be like, you know, what’s the best way that we can now translate this to dev? Like what are the variables you’re looking

Jarrad Grigg

Mmm.

Yianni

for? And we’re making sure that those two things are in sync so that when design is ready, his engineering part can take off and he’s already running

Jarrad Grigg

Yep.

Yianni

quickly. we’re 80 % there to get the ball rolling.

Jarrad Grigg

Amazing.

Yianni

yeah, it’s super amazing. I think for us, it’s like the cost efficiencies are less of telling clients, hey, we can build sites quickly and more of like, we can take the building part and the engineering down, but we want to use those hours still to just then push the design and the creativity and interact

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

interactivity in development and do really interesting, innovative stuff. like, I like the shift now for us of where we can put our time versus the manual, typing away and setting the structure.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. You’re not just pocketing the margin. You’re, you’re, you’re using it to further your craft. It’s just the natural,

Yianni

Exactly.

Jarrad Grigg

it’s just why not? Right? Like that’s what you, this is what

Yianni

Alright.

Jarrad Grigg

you always wanted to do. yeah. So in the design tools, like you with like figment and

Chris

Yeah.

Yianni

Yeah, I mean, yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

pen.dev are you, because you’ve got Chris, it sounds like you guys are working really tightly together so you can iterate really quickly. So are you,

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

so effectively you’re designing a couple of key templates or something. And then you are using the on board agent in Figma or using like MCP, like using a separate ID to work on what works for you guys.

Yianni

Yeah, I mean, it’s been a mix. It’s funny because we’re constantly experimenting and seeing what’s

Jarrad Grigg

Yep.

Yianni

out there. So it’s like we haven’t locked in on a framework yet. And we even meet every, you know, a couple of weeks to just like look at these tools and shift. So we still live primarily in Figma. I do use the Figma MCP a lot and, you know, TJ, who actually just switched over to Figma. He had his Figma console MCP, which I found to be like better than the native Figma MCP. So I can use Claude, I use Claude. I’m just like locked into that myself. I’ll use Claude plus Figma to do a lot of my AI refinement and just, you know, setting variables and tokens and looking at things. I rarely ever say like, hey, get to designing, you know, like I’ll still handle all of that.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

Maybe I’ll do a couple, like you said, key templates. I’ll do a home page, a sub page. And then I might want to see what it might, it’s capable of. I’ll prompt it like, hey, I have, these are wire frames that we’ve designed for other interior pages. These are the components. This is the strategy. You know, look at my system. Let me see what you can put together. And I’ll like look

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

at it. And if it’s gets me, you know, 50%, 80 % there, I might then take that and then refine it myself manually.

Jarrad Grigg

Yep.

Yianni

But I still feel like for us it’s like, he knows, he knows where the time goes where it’s

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

gonna replace us and this is gonna do all of it. But for now, like I still love that part of getting in there and you know getting my hands dirty and adjusting. So, but back to your question. I think yeah, Figma MCP,

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. I think you’re doing it. That sounds amazing.

Yianni

yeah. Yeah. And then Chris, I, any other connections from?

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, I was gonna say it’s like you’re sorry. You’re jumping. They sort of say it’s like you’re

Yianni

go ahead.

Jarrad Grigg

using it. You’re this that was going to be the way I said that I use it as well is like it’s there’s no one set approach that I’m finding is like, you have to do it like this. It’s it’s you’re using it as a co worker. And you know, you’re using it to if you’ve got a blank canvas, but you’ve got requirements,

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

I use it to just bash out a brief and some wireframes, you know, and then you and

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

then you craft from there. And then once you’ve got

Yianni

Right.

Jarrad Grigg

something crafted, you go, okay, well, show me another variation of this or three. And

Yianni

Yes.

Jarrad Grigg

then you keep crafting and refining. there’s no,

Yianni

Yes.

Jarrad Grigg

it kind of, using it. I’m using it upfront to sometimes just spit something out on the page to work with. I’m using it to help me create variations of things, but it’s never like taking over. It’s just sort of

Yianni

No.

Jarrad Grigg

helping you move things along when you’re crafting with it. And it’s still, I still feel that that’s like, I don’t know if that’s taking, you know, away from us. think it’s sort of still helping, although the capabilities are. Getting very good.

Yianni

Yeah. I know you’re like, sometimes, wow, like, that’s even a better idea than I, you know, I had thought. but I do

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

think right now for us, it’s, it’s really much, it’s a tool and I feel like it’s supercharging us to, you know, we’re a small studio, three of us. but the fact that we can, you know, work on projects and I can leverage AI to just like experiment, try ideas, like show me, you know, 10 variations of this. And then I can start from there or you know or not if I’m just like hey I know exactly what I want to do I’m gonna just jump in there, and I’m gonna do it I don’t rely on it as like I need to use it, but it’s there and we try to leverage it as much as we can

Jarrad Grigg

And sometimes it’s actually a lot slower. Like if you’re in like

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

craft mode, you just know where you’re to wait for the agent, you know?

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Or it’s really useful if you’ve got 10 things to do at once and you just want to get it to change a bunch of things and then

Yianni

I

Jarrad Grigg

you come back to it.

Yianni

I think that’s a great point, because I do…

Chris

Yeah, I I think it depends on like

Yianni

yeah. Yo, go ahead, Chris.

Chris

I think it depends on how locked in you are on the idea, right? If you’re open to a

Yianni

Yeah.

Chris

a range of possibilities, then you can prompt like, hey, give me 10 variations on this, and then you’re like still open. But like the second that you’re locked in on a concept and an idea, prompting that is pretty difficult for both design and code,

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

without being very explicit or giving like, you like a two-page long prompt, like you’ll get closer and fine-tune it in. But like that, that last like five to ten percent is really hard.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, it’s this iterate that iterative loop.

Yianni

Yeah. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

And it’s like having someone that kind of understands, but doesn’t quite understand. And then you have to ask about the back and forth about 50 times. I just want to jump in there and do it. Yeah. But it’s definitely

Chris

Yeah, yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

getting better. So we haven’t spoken since like Fable 5 came out, know, and that, that as a model when I was playing that with, playing around with it came out, like the thing that blew me away was it’s UX capability. Whereas there’s not

Yianni

Hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

been a single model that I’ve ever used. It’s really grok the, like user flows. and a user’s, you know, where they’re going through a flow. So when it was generating, it was generating flows for me in pen.dev and I gave them the requirements and I was like, this is actually really good. Like this is like almost

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

senior level. It’s actually improved the UX of what I thought it should be. And it made some really smart decisions on a particular, like just a small app that I was working on. And that kind of shook me a little bit because I was like, okay, well, where’s it going? You know? If something like

Yianni

Thank

Jarrad Grigg

that, but then to your point, Chris, they’re so expensive, you know, to run something like that. It’s like having you having to pay a person anyway, you know, if you think about it, especially if you’re paying for API calls. So I think to your point, it’s like, we just need them to be faster now and cheaper. I don’t think it needs, they need that much more intelligence for the kind of work that we’re doing. Just need to go a lot faster.

Chris

Yeah, yeah. Well a and the frontier companies don’t want you to know that. They want to keep you on that frontier pricing structure. Yeah, exactly.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. Yeah. But the open source battle is going to change that. Right. Like Kimmy’s open weights

Chris

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

were what yesterday. And now people already

Chris

It’s gonna be

Jarrad Grigg

optimizing it.

Chris

yeah, it’s gonna be interesting though to see what happens there. I I don’t know how in the US I think it’s a little difficult because you know Kimmy Kimi 3 K3 is introducing itself as claw 10 to 15% of the time. It’s really obvious that model was distilled on Fable. So I don’t know where that’s

Jarrad Grigg

To stealth, Yep.

Chris

gonna go. That’s an interesting one. But Thinking Machines actually did release

Jarrad Grigg

Mm-hmm.

Chris

an open weight model, it’s not competing on Frontier. But it is the best open weight model in that’s US based right now, which is good and you know it it’s got some room to grow. But I think if as long as there’s at least one company pushing on that front, you know, that’ll

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

put a lot of pressure on frontier companies. Like we see already, Opus five is 50% the cost, roughly 50% the cost of Fable Five. And according to according to our visual analysis outperforms it. So

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, yeah, I’ve had some pretty good results with it. It makes a mean video game as well that I see on all the ex-posts that people generated games with it. Yeah, and

Chris

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But

Jarrad Grigg

also Ilya’s new model as well, he’s SSI, is it? They’re just starting to scale, so I wonder what’s

Chris

Yes.

Jarrad Grigg

coming there. Some good things coming out of the States. But yeah, mean like globally, yeah, sorry.

Chris

Yeah. And

Yianni

Yeah.

Chris

Groc four point six is coming out next week. Four

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

point seven is two weeks behind that apparently, according to Elon Sweet. So we’ll see.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. I wonder if he’ll open source his older models. We’ll see. But, I, I never get never bet against a long, you know, I was so impressed

Yianni

Hahaha.

Jarrad Grigg

with 4.5 and,

Chris

Ha ha ha.

Jarrad Grigg

he’s not slowing down. So, you know, who knows where that’s going to go.

Chris

I mean it’s it’s insane

Yianni

Yeah.

Chris

that they’re doing that and then they’re like leasing like how much compute to Anthropic and Google. Like he he really he really right. Yeah, yeah,

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, it shows the scale of what he’s built. It’s crazy. Yeah.

Chris

exactly. we’ve been talking recently about where is this headed. And you know, the experience I talked about where I was able to throw templates at Opus 4.8 and say go. And it took an hour to get through the first pass of all of those and then a week to get them to basically reach my standard.

Jarrad Grigg

Mm.

Chris

That turned the light bulb on in my head. And I was like, there’s a step beyond this. Because I can improve that. Like I can that’s I say like probably up to 70%. But how do I get it

Jarrad Grigg

Mm-hmm.

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Chris

to 90%? And

Jarrad Grigg

my first shot.

Chris

from a first shot.

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Chris

And the process is one that like so I had many follow-on conversations with Claude trying to like distill this idea down and like think about how to approach it and

Jarrad Grigg

Mmm.

Chris

land it on this concept of encoded judgment. And I think that’s where the industry as a whole, it’s it’s kind of it’s interesting because I say like f through the lens of a of a web developer, the last thing that was this foundational was responsive design.

Jarrad Grigg

Mm-hmm.

Chris

I think this is gonna be like that level of a change, but it’s not only gonna impact web development. It’s software engineering as a whole.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

Hmm

Chris

And it’s basically this idea of creating a system where you get the information out of your brain and into a document for context, right? So it’s yeah, continually

Jarrad Grigg

Yes, yes, yes, you’re dead right. Yep.

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Chris

improving. But it also depends on the way you run it. It’s not just one shot running one way, it’s creating a closed loop where

Jarrad Grigg

Hmm.

Chris

you run it, it runs in a vowel against the design. that is in pure spec and you you eliminate the drift because it’s right now the the reason why you can feed You have the Figma MCP, right? Feeding tokens and all that design information into the model to go build. The

Jarrad Grigg

Mm-hmm.

Chris

reason why it’s possible to do that and you still don’t get it quite right is the drift. And it’s a vision problem. It’s not a prompting problem. The agent

Jarrad Grigg

Yes. Yep.

Chris

literally cannot see it. So what it really will work well, what the agent really does well is being able to say, like, against an Aval, you said 24, I did 20. Fix that.

Jarrad Grigg

Yep. Yep.

Chris

So creating that closed loop system where you can say like build it now go compare it and then run that loop over and over

Jarrad Grigg

Yep. Yep.

Chris

and over again and then optimize the system and getting that information out of your head. By getting the information out of your head, the number of loops that you need to run to get it to say that 90% should decrease over time. Yeah. And so that’s that’s what we’re working

Jarrad Grigg

Yes. Yep. Yeah. I mean, just

Chris

on.

Jarrad Grigg

absolutely nailed it. I, we are very aligned and so a lot to unpack there. on, on the Figma to build side of things, I actually, been working with a team on basically trying to build something that one shots from Figma. So they have their web designs, their frames and, they want to build it a certain way. So they have a certain stack. And essentially my job was to try and say, okay, build this and loop and come back with a perfect design. Now the, was, you know, this sounds like it was probably about a month ago now. So it’s 17 years in AI terms, but I went through like five architectures of a very strict system, like a proper built out product. It was was a plugin. that worked with the local bridge. So it streams the data out of Figma because it was using quite a lot into the

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

IDE. And I just couldn’t get it to be perfect. The results were inconsistent. To your point, Chris, I think it was a vision problem, but it was even comparing. So it would take the raw data, it would send the packets and then it would take screenshots and would compare them and it had a visual diff. So in the report that it was generating, it was creating a visual diff and trying to get them to match. And what I kind of found was that it was super time consuming to do this. Like it wasn’t

Yianni

Hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

quick at all. And the results were not as good as if I had to just sat there and prompted the agent myself without all of the bloat. So I ended up distilling all of that down to your second point, getting the information out of your head, distilled that down into a skill. So all the learnings

Yianni

Mm.

Jarrad Grigg

from that system plus everything else that I could think of, and then the skill actually worked a lot better. it didn’t restrict the agent. kind of said here, he’s everything you need. Go. and so, yeah, you’re absolutely right. Like, and I try to tell teams this, that if you’re engineers, your job now is to just take everything in your head and put it into a text file. And they just look at me like, that’s the most I can’t, I might as well just go move to Hawaii or something and like pack it up, pack it up. I don’t want that. I don’t want to do that. but I think there’s a different kind of work involved in it. you know, you’re kind of doing that, but that’s just, it’s just hilarious. You have so aligned with.

Chris

Well Yeah, yeah. And like, well, a couple other things. I would say like I I I see a future where this is how things work, but thinking about the economics of this, think about like a large agency, right? Where say you have a large agency where the the team comes together and forms a consensus on this is how we do things. That’s gonna inform those skills. those skills files that are driving that agent. But that’s almost gonna like it not almost, it is going to become a form of IP. It’s

Jarrad Grigg

Correct.

Chris

that company’s how we build. And

Yianni

Mm Right.

Chris

so like there’s a lot to unpack there, right? Like it it shouldn’t live in one platform. There should be no lock-in. It doesn’t just live in codecs or I don’t know it’s like

Yianni

What?

Chris

Claude what’s what’s their

Jarrad Grigg

Yep.

Yianni

Grok, what?

Chris

I just

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, I know what mean. It shouldn’t be tied to… Claude Code, yeah.

Chris

Yeah. What’s what what’s clawed code? Yeah, there we go. There we go. I was

Yianni

Yeah, code. We’ve got the code.

Chris

like code, it’s too simple, it’s too simple. What’s the name? or cursor or

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

you know, windsurfer or whatever, you know, whatever platform you’re using shouldn’t be tied in.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, you need to own it.

Chris

It’s gotta be able to move between and own it, right? And yeah. But there’s there’s a lot to

Jarrad Grigg

Yep. But you then also beyond that, right? Like you see that that’s the role now in, in, in, I’ve worked with a few companies now and then, and try to advise them on this stuff. And that’s what I say is you need to start distilling this stuff down into, to text documents. But as you say, and you’re right, it is, that is their IP someone and it’s a text file. Someone can just take that. Right. So the next thing I’m seeing is it’s like, have you guys played with buzz? Jack Dorsey’s new offering.

Chris

I’ve seen it. I haven’t played with it. Yeah, it’s like a slack and get combo.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, so it’s like a well, it’s it’s kind of a it’s I think it’s a bigger deal than people are making. They don’t really quite get it. But it’s it’s built on NOSTA. So I don’t know if you know what NOSTA is. But it’s all cryptographically secure. So and you instead of a sign in, you just get your own private key. But

Yianni

No.

Jarrad Grigg

the idea behind that is that all that knowledge is encrypted. But you can still take it with you. So these kind of get you basically all the agents within it. All of the data is it’s got its own built-in memory system and everything like that. So it’s kind of like Hermes-esque, I guess, but it’s all encrypted.

Yianni

Mm.

Jarrad Grigg

so, cause I was trying to build something like this for my own system. And at the moment, all of my context sits in the application directory of my system on my computer. Like I don’t want that. And if you want to roll that out across the company and all the staff members have that, then what happens when someone leaves? You know, want to be able to have all of that data encrypted and then they get revoked and they don’t have, they just can’t use it. It’s just gibberish on their machine.

Yianni

Mmm.

Jarrad Grigg

I think that’s kind of where I’m seeing things going.

Chris

I mean arguably like there should be someone at a company that owns the the input of that, right? Or like the process

Jarrad Grigg

Hmm.

Chris

is kind of like one way. And you’re you’re prompting, right? But like you at some level when when this data is really protected and people really care about it, they probably don’t want people reading the raw data, right? Like that’s like you you shouldn’t be like just going in and reading that.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All they get is the prompt

Yianni

Right, right.

Jarrad Grigg

output, you know, that, yeah, yeah. And then you got to worry about people distilling your company’s knowledge through the.

Chris

Right. Yeah. But then but then like where does it go from there, right? Because th this world isn’t strictly agency and like from even from Dio’s standpoint, as being a small studio, a small agency, a small company, like we can build this, right? What happens if we decide we’re gonna build something like that and then we’re gonna go out and sell it? And what happens when you get like

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Chris

companies that want to do the same thing and they start selling theirs and then you have this like almost like cross pollination effect of like, This is how I do it, this is how I do it, this is how I do it. And then like soon enough, like it’s all

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Already seen it.

Chris

just out there and then like what is the what is the secret sauce that you’re what’s the you know, like where’s the value? I don’t know.

Jarrad Grigg

The secret source is the company knowledge, the company context. That’s it. It’s hundred percent. That’s it. Because if you’re selling

Chris

Yeah. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

a product or service and you’re doing it better and better than the competitor, it ain’t the software you’re using that’s letting you do that. It’s, it’s all the teamwork. Exactly.

Chris

I mean the value is it’s the it comes down to the people. It’s the people.

Yianni

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yep. Yep. And you can, you can distill a lot of that down into text files to help people work faster. And the system around that, like you say, everyone’s going to be building these, but what is that? distillation. I think it yeah, like that’s why I mentioned buzz because I think this heavily encrypted approach is probably where it seems to make the most sense until you know, agents can crack encryption, which is probably not too far off. Yeah,

Yianni

Mythos. Get in there.

Jarrad Grigg

nothing’s safe. Yeah, but I mean, if they crack if they

Yianni

No.

Chris

I’ll just

Jarrad Grigg

crack that right, there’s bigger things to you know, that cracks banking encryption

Yianni

Yeah, no.

Jarrad Grigg

and stuff. So that’s like

Chris

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

some company’s knowledge is Yeah.

Yianni

screwed. Jared, you mentioned

Jarrad Grigg

Anyway.

Yianni

payload CMS earlier. That’s something we’ve been looking at and talking about. How you’ve been using it. You like it? Like what are your thoughts on it? Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. I really like it just because it’s easy. It’s and you know, it’s, it seems very agent friendly.

Yianni

Hmm

Jarrad Grigg

he, I’ve just used it a couple of times. my new site uses it. I just asked

Yianni

Okay.

Jarrad Grigg

the agent set me up a payload CMS and you know, a few minutes later, there it was

Yianni

it

Jarrad Grigg

all my pages and content was there. And then I could just work with the agent on changing things.

Yianni

Okay.

Chris

Yeah. We’ve been working

Jarrad Grigg

I really like it.

Chris

with s sanity a lot, but the trade

Jarrad Grigg

Yes.

Chris

off there seems to be that like Sanity is like fully managed and they handle everything, whereas payload you’re kind of on the hook for your managing your own database and all that side of things and it’s it’s a trade off between those things. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yep. Yeah.

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, exactly. It’s like, you know, framer

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

versus building your own website, right? Like, I mean, I don’t

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

mind with, with, I’m hosting this anyway through like, versus L so in super base sort of, so it doesn’t really bother me.

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

That’s I’m okay with that. There’s other solutions. So I guess it’s just like, it’s a tool.

Yianni

Now with-

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. Sorry.

Yianni

I was gonna say now with when you mentioned framer. I’m just curious Are you still playing around with framer or have you moved out of it now because?

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I, I wanted, when I migrated to, this, this separate stuff, I’m using Astro and payload for the new site. When I migrated to that, was

Yianni

OK, yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

because the agent tools in framer, I just, wasn’t fast enough. and then they announced frame three. I got half a through work on this and then frame three came out and I’ve been playing a bit with it and it’s, it’s actually really quite good. it’s pretty speedy.

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

the agent works really well

Yianni

Hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

and they also introduced branching. I only worked this out today. I was playing with it and I was working with my agent to update something. I’m like, where is it? I don’t see it

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

on the board. It’s like, it’s in this branch. I’m like, when did you introduce that? Where? And then there’s this, it was just branching and it’s built in. used to be like an extra paid fee, you know, so they, they’re

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

constantly iterating. yeah. And, and again, like the agent seems to be really good. It’s,

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

quite fast. and it has a lot of context of how frame of works. It’s not just trying

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

to figure things out or it, you know, you, if you tell it to create another variation and component, it’ll do it all perfectly. I haven’t had any issues with it. So it does. Yeah.

Yianni

Yeah, same. I’ve been loving it as the branch. It’s funny because I ran into I knew they had the branching feature, but I wasn’t like so apparent to me when it was working in a branch that I had to tell the agent. I’m like, listen, when you branch off and make a new branch, make sure you tell me in the response that you’re in a new branch so I can like mentally say, like I got to go check there. But it’s really, really good.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, yeah

Yianni

and everything I’ve thrown at it and the fact that it can jump into the CMS, can edit like

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

CMS collections.

Jarrad Grigg

Brilliant.

Yianni

Yeah, that’s great stuff.

Jarrad Grigg

As the zoomers say, they cooked. They’re not cooked. They cooked. They are cooking. Yeah, it’s a

Yianni

They are cooking.

Jarrad Grigg

great, it’s a great platform. And again, it’s just another option, right? If you want that self-hosted solution. I did try a

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

workflow of fully AI native website generation. So from a extended call, so having a meeting template where I know everything I need to discuss and then just having like an hour and a half, two hour conversation. and literally taking that and turning that into a website, you know, the client would provide some photos and stuff like that. And you just generate the rest of the photos. And

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

yeah, to your point, Chris, like you get, you get something and it’s pretty good. It’s like, it, it thinks about all the SEO, it does performance, uses like page speed insights to be performant. And, but then you start to want to tweak things, you know, the design’s

Yianni

Mm-mm.

Jarrad Grigg

a bit lacking, you know, I want to change this row, I want to change that row. And then you don’t have the kind of framework. fine-grained controls, you don’t have Figma controls, and then you gotta try and get into that iterative loop of hell of working with the agent to make those changes, and it’s not quite there. So, I don’t know, maybe I’ll use Framer for that, I can’t, but I just tried

Chris

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

a fully agent-native stack, and it just wasn’t great from the get-go.

Chris

That’s

Yianni

Yeah.

Chris

and that’s where I step in. I’m like, okay, I can do this. I know how I know how to get this over the over the

Yianni

That’s exactly, it is a perfect scenario for us, at least where it’s like, yeah,

Jarrad Grigg

I need a Chris.

Chris

Ha ha ha.

Yianni

I’m design Chris’s engineering.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

I can use these tools like you’re saying, Jared, like I can manually design in Figma use AI to prototype or get some motion. And I can get mine like close enough that I can show Chris and be like,

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

this is what I was thinking. This transition, you know, this scroll base interaction, like All right, now you engineer this properly in the way that you would do it. And

Jarrad Grigg

So good.

Yianni

it’s nice to have that handoff where I can know that the quality and the performance and everything’s going to be dialed in. But I gave him enough with just

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

what I could do with my AI agent. So.

Jarrad Grigg

I’m so jealous. I’ve got a Yanny and Chris, just like half of you. So not quite the brilliance of both of you. It’s just either side of my,

Chris

Ha ha ha.

Jarrad Grigg

yeah. that’s so good.

Yianni

You know, gotta get a Slack room with you in there with

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

us, just so

Chris

Yeah.

Yianni

it’s easier for us all to chat too.

Chris

Agreed.

Jarrad Grigg

Would love to invite me to yours. I’ll invite you to mine, whatever, whatever works. Yeah. I’m keen. Did you have you been playing with,

Yianni

Maybe we should set that up. Yeah, I’ll talk, yeah. We’ll definitely set that up. Yeah.

Chris

yeah, I mean

Jarrad Grigg

figma motion? I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah.

Yianni

Yeah. my God. I did a post on X. I didn’t know that you could use the AI agent with Figma motion to have it prompt like key frames. you know, I did like a show real carousel thing that kind of blew up on X where I was just like blown away that I can say like, want these cards to animate left to right. I want them to center. Like I just prompted it and it handled all the key frames and then I could go through it again. tweak manually I could stagger them and do whatever else I wanted but the fact that I could use AI to get the base level in there for animation I was like this is another game changer yeah

Jarrad Grigg

So getting you off the ground. Amazing. And again, was that Claude that you were using to do that or were you using the on canvas agent?

Yianni

That was in Framer with their AI agent. then it’s funny, someone wrote on X, like, you what did he say? What are we doing? You’re relying on this too much. You would be faster to manually do versus use the agent.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

Actually, I don’t even know if it would be, honestly. There was

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

10 cards that had set each key frame. It probably would have been longer. It went pretty fast.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

And I think if you’re thinking that way, ahead. Yeah. I’d like to hear your rebuttal.

Jarrad Grigg

My rebuttal to that. Yes. Yes. Sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off. was going to say my rebuttal to that position is yeah, maybe today, but if you’re not learning how to use these tools, give it, you know, three weeks, four weeks, a month, the models are going to be faster. It’s all about our fluency. It’s all about understanding how to

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

use it. If you’ve got your head in the sand, so I can do that myself. It’s like, Okay. Well.

Yianni

Yeah, the good old-fashioned way, you know?

Chris

You have to know where that jagged edge is, right? Like AI is is progressing and evolving and getting better, but it’s not just a flat curve like moving forward as as it gets better. It’s a jagged edge of

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

like, it’s better at this, it’s better at this, this model’s better at this, way up here. What you’re doing by t kicking the tires and playing with these things continuously is you’re testing where that edge is for each capability

Jarrad Grigg

Mm-hmm.

Chris

and understanding that and understanding how much you can give it and how much you need to like pair back in certain areas or provide more detailed thorough prompts to get to a end result in the fastest way. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. You’re

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

really good with the analogies, man. It’s perfect.

Yianni

Ha ha.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, you’re right. You got it. And you’re teaching yourself, you know, what’s working, what’s not working. How do you be more efficient with it? And that kind of just compounds. you know, if you build your own

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

system on your machine, you just learns the way that you like to work and things just speed up. You know, when I’m general, I’ve got this, that other podcast and you know, the workflows that I’m building into. the editing of that now, it’s like, it’s just learned and I don’t even, I didn’t even need to create skills. I’m like, okay, generate the thumbnail and it just knows the process

Yianni

All right.

Jarrad Grigg

that we’ve gone through. Right. It’s just compounding learnings. but as you say, it’s not good

Chris

Yeah.

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

at everything.

Chris

What I do wonder on the front of

Yianni

But it gets you… Go ahead, Chris.

Chris

what I do wonder is, you know, like I I see encoded judgment as the feature of this and how do we capture what’s in our brains. And what’s really surprising to me is that cursor or some other platform hasn’t already created a feature where it’s like creating the UI. to say, here are all the decisions you made today. Let’s let’s walk through these and decide, is this something that is unique to that this build or unique to this client? Or is this something that’s universal that should be part of a save right saved as like a

Yianni

Mm, saved. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

and put pulled into your knowledge base or your context. Right.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, it’s like an end of day wind down session where that’s

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

a really good idea because it just disappears and you just kind of cross your fingers. You have to ask it, do we learn that? Where do we learn that? Where is that? I really

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

like that. Who’s going to build it?

Chris

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we’re we’re we’re working on it and that’s part of the closed

Jarrad Grigg

That would be really useful. Okay, yeah.

Chris

loop system is like you can’t these things, these learnings can’t disappear. They can’t just go into the chat you know your chat history and

Yianni

Yeah.

Chris

cursor or whatever it is. It’s gotta actually start getting moved forward. if it doesn’t move forward

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

then you’re not building up that that context and it’s not progressing.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

And then that paired

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Chris

with like, you know, avowels and like a closed loop where it’s running over and over and over again to get closer to the end result is is really how I think we end up getting to a place where maybe it loops five times and you’re at 90%. Boom. You know,

Jarrad Grigg

Yep.

Chris

and then human takes to the last 10%.

Jarrad Grigg

and it’s all about the input. What’s the idea? And you’re spending more time there. Completely agree.

Chris

Yeah.

Yianni

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

What’s your thoughts on doing the same for brand identity systems? Because I’ve been working on something

Chris

Mm.

Jarrad Grigg

at the moment to sort of tackle that where, you know the inputs for brand, right? Like if you were creating

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

a brand for a company, you kind of know all the things you’re going to need in order to create a great brand, know, photography style, tone

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

of voice, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

And then these ages can spit out various types of artifacts, you know, it might be a graphic for an Instagram post. might be a document template. It might be a business card design. I don’t know, whatever. And previously you just kind of have to trawl through the style guide and the designer would pick that up and spit something out. I think a lot of that grunt work of translating a brand into a specific output is probably going to go away with like agentic brand systems where you kind of distill

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

all of that. into something where when you’re asking it, it’s just going to know the rules of the brand, you know, much more rigorously and can to your point, Chris, spit something out that gets you 89 % of the way there in the format that you want. And then you can play around with it to finish it off. If

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

you guys played around with any tools like that, or you built your own or you even think you’re doing anything in that space.

Chris

Thinking about it a little bit, you know, I see two separate things here. There’s one, like you’ve got the system built and it’s able to generate assets in the name and the tone, voice, and tone, and generate things for the brand because it knows the brand. But I thought your initial question was using it to like create and build a brand and how you do that.

Jarrad Grigg

No, well, no separate so that you can use it to help you do that. But that’s a very human problem. You know, I

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

still don’t see

Chris

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

the models being able to, I mean, it is pattern recognition at the end of the day, but like a human mind has, you know, I don’t know, 20, 30, 40 years of recognizing things from all types of things and going, this brand needs a little bit of that in the, in that 1930s

Yianni

Mm-hmm.

Jarrad Grigg

poster that I remember from, you know, where a bit of that and my type reference. So you. That’s a very human problem to do that now to create something unique and show I can assist. But I think that the crafting that unique style is still something that’s going to be done by people. But then it’s all like in a large scale brand, the amount of things that have to be created, you know, and you want,

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

it’s like, if you’re creating ad variations, you know, Facebook business manager ad variations, you know, no one’s going to be doing that by hand anymore. Like you just have an

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

agentic system that can just spit out, you know, a hundred variations, whatever it is.

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

That kind of work more and also

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

like everyone on the team, right? So like if you have like an agency or a business 30 40 50 people and they all need to create pitch decks and blah blah blah, whatever It just does it much more consistently rather than having like 50 versions of different figma files that most studios seem to have This is my version and I’ve edited that version and that table looks really good. Let me take that over to mine and you know that

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

kind of stuff

Yianni

Yeah, we’ve

Chris

Yeah. Yeah.

Yianni

been exploring it. I mean, this project we’re working on now, we, I think, you know, I think we’re getting there. Like we’re building custom branding, like element generators, like it builds the textures. You can use these toolings that we built so you can go in there and you can adjust and you can export out some of the graphics in the brand style that we set. They also have some like interaction ones and parts, all like parts of the system, but we haven’t designed or built yet the full like everything is in there. You get the typography. You can say like, this is a presentation deck. Like I want this on brand. It’s going to be for this, you know, export and give me those files. But I think we’re really getting there. Figma just announced their AI like skills agent. I don’t know if you saw that one, Jared, but I

Jarrad Grigg

No.

Yianni

think it’s kind of meant for this. We just talked about last week and we haven’t internally dove in too deep, but it’s meant for that where you can feed it voice and tone, colors, everything and say, all right, give me three social posts variations on this topic and it’ll, you know, export, put them on the canvas. I think it might be integrated. It’s, it’s in

Jarrad Grigg

it’s not wave? Or is it like a skill system or is it wave? Integrated with wave.

Yianni

Figma skills. It’s not weave. But yeah, so I haven’t. Again, it’s like, you know, these things keep dropping every day. So it’s like when you find time to play with it. But when I saw that, was like, ooh, this is pretty powerful. Because at least for me, like, I know there’s probably scenarios where there’s people that aren’t in the design and creative, but they, you know, they’re marketing and they’re just like, all right, give me the rules and I’ll just look at the variations and I’ll pick one. But for now, for me, like I like that it’s in Figma and they’re editable layers.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

and I can refine

Jarrad Grigg

Yep.

Yianni

them to maybe that closed loop, I can see what it gave me and I can then feed back in, you know, never do this or continue to do this. You’re right. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. Yeah. The end of the day, ask the question. Yeah. But you could, you could get it to generate it like generating Figma or generating Claude design or Canva. You know, it’s, it’s up to the client, right? yeah,

Yianni

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

I just see it being something I’ve seen a few people now with that product and I actually I’m working on myself. so I just wanted to see where you guys were at with it, but, it’s a, it’s a meaty problem to. Yeah.

Yianni

Yeah, internally too. It is a meaty one. you know, like Monica handles the strategy and she does a lot of LinkedIn posts and you know, she’s getting more comfortable with Figma, but I’m constantly trying to find ways to make her life easier where she knows what she wants to say. She doesn’t want to really mess around with things in Figma, but give her a platform, AI, whatever it is that she could just say, like, this is the idea of the post. This is the language I want. And it generates something in our brand. that she can then use and save some time for her. So we’re internally

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. Yeah.

Yianni

trying to figure it out. We’re also trying to figure it out for clients and it’s close. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

that’s the best way to do it. Dog food it, you know, if it works for you to work for everyone else. Yeah. well, keep me up to date with it. You know, want to do the same.

Yianni

I will. I will. Awesome.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. Cool. Anything else you noticed guys that jumped out at you as being amazing that any experiments.

Yianni

kind of thing.

Chris

I don’t know about amazing, but you know, Yanni was mentioning using the the Figma console MCP from TJ.

Yianni

Yeah.

Chris

TJ he he created this this MCP for Figma before the official Figma and it had write capabilities into Figma before the official Figma MCP did.

Jarrad Grigg

Crazy. To hell.

Chris

So he actually is is now over at Figma. He’s joined Figma and he’s working with them directly. But he released an article a couple days ago on the title is Use AI to need less AI. And it’s a really interesting article. It’s it’s kind of on the on the edge of the encoded judgment and a closed loop system, but more on the design system side because that’s that’s what he works in as design system. So it’s not really talking about the build too much. But one interesting thing that he mentions in here is basically talking about how like when when you go to build and you’re using a Figma Figma MCP or Figma console MCP, one of the first steps is getting those tokens from the design system into the agent. And there’s a layer of interpretation there,

Jarrad Grigg

Hmm.

Chris

which is part of that initial problem of a little bit of of of drift of the vision problem that’s happening.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, yep.

Chris

And you know, he was saying, you know, like that doesn’t need to be probabilistic. operation, it can be deterministic. We have Figma, we have the data, we can get the spec out. And there’s a lot of companies that he mentioned starting up, but there is this one that he mentions that’s specsplugin.com. And it basically

Yianni

is.

Jarrad Grigg

take a look.

Chris

is I think it’s an extension that you can open in in Figma basically will export out the stack for components and you can feed that into your LLM directly. So there’s not that interpretation layer happening. So it’s it’s like you get closer to the originally the actual intended design in the design tokens and the stuff that you’re sending into the agent on that first pass on the front end of the of the build. and

Jarrad Grigg

cool.

Chris

as they as they mentioned, you know, like it’s The speed to run it is like one second. Agentic Figma extraction is five to ten minutes. the AI cost is a script. It’s a script with

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, speed’s the big one. Yeah.

Chris

zero tokens, zero tokens to do this. might use like twenty-five fifty to a hundred thousand plus tokens per component if you do it with AI. So it’s saving on speed, it’s saving on cost to do this. It seems like a no-brainer. We’re gonna be working that into our our workflow pretty shortly here so that we’re not using t

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah, I’ve been, yeah, this is great. Do a lot of experiments and experimentation in this space. It’s just hard to get right. And this looks pretty good. I don’t think like the other thing is, know, when, know, figma sat on their hands for a while, right? And everyone’s like, figma’s dead. And all these other tools we kept going. No, they’re not. They have a lot of capital. They’re taking their time. They’re going to do it well. And this kind

Chris

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

of thing I see

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

they will do as well. I think, you know, I read an article the other day where they were there. shifting more towards like auto layouts becoming more like CSS like Flexbox, right? So they’re kind of Transitioning to be closer

Yianni

Mm. Mm.

Jarrad Grigg

and closer to the front-end standard And so I have the feeling that they’re gonna try and just move more that way with what you’re designing is what you’re building anyway Like like framer. It’s Kind of inevitable.

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

They just take their time. But in the meantime

Chris

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

having incredible solutions

Yianni

Yeah

Jarrad Grigg

like this Help a lot. This is great. Thanks for the share

Chris

Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. I agree on Figma, by the way. Not

Yianni

Yeah, sounds similar like

Chris

okay. Go ahead.

Yianni

yeah, both points. Like everyone who says someone one company’s dead. I’m like, I don’t believe like just give them time and you know, they might be down for a year or a couple months and then next, know, they drop some feature that just crushes everyone. And I, yeah,

Chris

Yeah, let’s see what Apple does in the next year.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

everyone. And then paper, I’m sure you’ve seen paper, Jared, the

Jarrad Grigg

Fees that as well. Yep.

Yianni

design app, and everyone kind of compares that like Figma should go that route, right, where it’s like, You’re basically building in the DOM. Everything you see is a site. So I’m sure Figma is going to work their way that way as well, or a version

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah.

Yianni

of it that’s like you have an open canvas and then you have like the web builder version, code version.

Jarrad Grigg

Yeah. Well, they have sites. It’s just, I haven’t returned to sites in some time. I just found it quite clunky when I used it first. I was like, not what I want.

Yianni

Yeah, I

Jarrad Grigg

but maybe they’ll keep iterating on it. Who knows? But they got an interesting problem

Yianni

Who knows?

Jarrad Grigg

because they have to design everything, you know, they’re the, they’re the design everything tool. Whereas something like

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

paper is no, no, we deal with the web design tool. it’s a bit more specialist.

Yianni

Where the? Yep, simple.

Jarrad Grigg

It’s simple. Right. I did use,

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

I did use it. I thought it was quite good. But to your point, it’s like, these are just tools. It’s still about

Yianni

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

creativity and exploration and having a bit of fun and using the right tool for the right job.

Yianni

Yeah. 100%. 100%.

Chris

Yep. one more thing was I was mentioning like cursor did test on creating SQL Lite from documentation and having single agents run versus having a planner and execution agent.

Jarrad Grigg

Mm-hmm.

Chris

They say that that in the run that used GPT five point five for both planners and workers, the cost was over nine thousand dollars. And the cost where they used Opus four point eight to do the planning and composer two point five to to do the work, the entire fleet was under five hundred dollars. So it’s a huge huge difference. Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

That’s the way, that’s massive. That’s the way to go. That’s the way to go.

Yianni

Matt. Matt.

Jarrad Grigg

You think they’re doing that with Grok and Composer. That’s the play.

Chris

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

it’s Elon scales, Grok and you know, curses using comp- I don’t know. We’ll see. Yeah, I think you’re right. That’s amazing. I’ll be doing that. All right. Well guys,

Yianni

soon.

Chris

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

58 minutes. So thanks so much. This

Yianni

Good stuff.

Jarrad Grigg

is incredible. I like

Chris

Yeah.

Jarrad Grigg

I can talk to you guys forever. we’ll stop it

Yianni

I know.

Jarrad Grigg

there.