Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:17:13 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
After execution, we have review and then we have peer review, which is really cool and we'll get into later on, and at the end, we update the docs. So this is updating documentation and everything so that agents can write better code later on. So I think what we'll do is we're going to build a feature live for my app, which I think is really cool. But first what I'd like to do is show you the app so you have some context. So this is StudyMate. It's a platform for students, which allows them to upload study materials and create interactive tests based on their own materials. So here we can go to the top. Let's upload a PDF. We can decide what pages we want to be quizzed on. We can decide the number of questions, the difficulty level. And basically what happens behind the scenes is we send the information the user uploaded along with the system prompt and any other augmentations the users decided to Gemini and we create a quiz. These are challenging questions that are meant to assess comprehension. You even have some hints and once we do a few of these, we can submit ... I got them right? [00:18:21] S0: Terrible results. [00:18:22] S1: Yeah, lucky. [00:18:23] S0: And so just to be really clear about this, this is like a side business that you have, an app that you built that's making money. That's like a thing you vibe coded having no technical experience. [00:18:32] S1: Yeah, this is my weekend project. Yeah. This is what I do. [00:18:35] S0: Amazing.
00:18:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Zevi Arnovitz
[00:18:35] S0: Amazing. [00:18:35] S1: On weekends. Yeah. So you get basically deep explanations into why each question was wrong or each question was right. And at the moment, StudyMate only has multiple choice questions. And I was doing some competitor research over the last weekend and I saw competitors who had true or false questions and also fill in the blank questions, which I loved. So I think that'd be really cool if we could build that live. How's that sound? [00:19:00] S0: I love it. Crossing your fingers, this all work. I just want to highlight the stuff you shared right before this in cursor. So this is a huge deal, what you describe here. This is essentially what you've figured out is a way as a person that has no idea how to write any code, how to build a product in Cursor as a product manager using this series of /commands that you've concocted that you're going to be sharing with listeners. They can download all these and just use them directly. They don't have to figure out all these prompts that you've figured out. [00:19:31] S1: Yeah, 100%. Basically what happened was I formulated the backbone of this with the CTO, and it was basically within the system prompt of the CTO project that I had within GPT. So it said, step one, we do this. Step two, we do this. And now I'll keep building. And if I see something that happens over and over again, I'll just create a /command and then it will be automated within the workflow.
00:19:31 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:31] S1: Yeah, 100%. Basically what happened was I formulated the backbone of this with the CTO, and it was basically within the system prompt of the CTO project that I had within GPT. So it said, step one, we do this. Step two, we do this. And now I'll keep building. And if I see something that happens over and over again, I'll just create a /command and then it will be automated within the workflow. [00:19:54] S0: Amazing. So just to summarize the /command. So one is create an issue in Linear, which I love. Linear is awesome. Shout out Linear. [00:20:02] S1: That's also from the product pass. [00:20:04] S0: From the product pass. Oh my God, what a value? Okay. So step one is create the issue in linear. So it's a command. So this prompt /command you've created, just create issue. Then it's explore, which is explore the idea, help me ideate on what this could be. And this is Claude helping you think through the feature and product. And then it's actually create the plan. And so it's like the AI helping you build the plan to build the product. Then it's actually execute, which is just build the thing. And then there's this review, peer review step, which is awesome that you'll share. And then there's document, update documentation based on the new feature that we're adding. Sweet.
00:20:44 · Zevi Arnovitz
[00:20:44] S1: Yeah. Cool. So let's go ahead and start building. So I'm going to use Wispr Flow to dictate and basically this starts with /create issue. So this basically sends that prompt. And I love this because I usually do this during when I'm building something else. So basically it tells Claude that I'm mid building something and I don't have a lot of time to waste time on this. So just ask some brief questions so that you have enough to capture within linear. So I want to add fill in the blank questions to StudyMate. I want this to be 30% of tests to be generated as fill in the blank questions. I want there to be six potential answers for two blank spots, and of course there's only going to be two correct answers. So one correct answer and two incorrect answers for each spot and I want the interface to be drag and drop. So that's just basically a quick think of how I want this to work. So it's going to ask me a few questions. Quizzes are 100% multiple choice, question structure, single sentence passage to blanks and priority. So one and two are correct, and this is not high priority. It's a nice to have feature. So now basically what Claude is going to do is it's going to use MCP, which is basically a technology that was created by Anthropic, which gives AI the ability to use tools. So this is connected to my linear. So what it's going to do now is it's going to use everything we've said and create an issue within Linear.
00:22:30 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:22:30] S0: And by the way, as this is loading, I just love the way, the way you described this, especially doing voice mode, it's like exactly how you would talk to an engineer describing a feature, "Here's what I want." And then they ask you questions, here's the clarification.
00:22:43 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:22:43] S1: Yeah. So at first when I was doing this with the CTO, I would do it with ChatGPT voice mode, and that was crazy. That literally felt like ideating with a person. It would push back, ask questions, and maybe one day the coding tools will get there too, but that was exactly ... It really felt like sitting with my CTO. Great. So created STU88. So if we open up Linear now, we should be able to see ... Let's see where STU88. There it is. Fill in the blank questions with drag and drop interface. So it has a TLDR, it has the current state. It did a little bit of research on the code base, I think, expected outcomes, some context. So yeah, so this is basically ready for me to pick up when I'm interested in building. So now let's say a few days go by, I finished the current project I'm working on, I can pick it up. So when I pick it up, I do /exploration phase, which is what we said. And then instead of pressing enter, I'll press tab and I'll show you this. So basically, exploration phase, what it does is it will take an argument. This is basically a placeholder within the prompt, which allows me to enter something that is extra context for the AI. So I can say here, Linear STU88, which is referencing the ticket. And now what it's going to do is it's going to go, it's going to fetch the Linear ticket. [00:24:12] S0: And what's the idea? What's the goal of the exploration phase? This ideate on the idea. Is that the- [00:24:12] S1: Exactly. [00:24:12] S0: Okay.