Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:06:05 · Zevi Arnovitz
[00:06:05] S1: I'm very non-technical. I have zero technical background. Did music in high school. A lot of Israelis do technology units in the Army. I was not in a tech unit. And basically a year ago, I was traveling with my wife for three months in Asia and we were in Japan and that was around when Sonnet 3.5 came out. And I remember watching a YouTube video. I think it was either Greg Isenberg or Riley Brown and they were basically building apps using, it was either Bolt or Lovable, just using AI. And it was like a crazy moment for me because I was watching this and it basically felt like someone came up to me and said, "Hey Zevi, there's this cool new technology you should check out. You should really give it a try. Oh, and by the way, you have superpowers now." And the second I got home from Japan, I didn't even unpack my bags, ran to my computer, opened Bolt, opened an account, and for the past year I've been building. And the last thing I'll say on that is we talked about this a bit before we started recording, but I was prepping with Claude for the episode and I was trying to clarify what my goal is for this episode. And Claude said, "If people walk away thinking how amazing you are, you failed. And if people walk away and open their computer and start building, you've succeeded." So I really hope that we can inspire some people to do the same.
00:07:27 · Lenny Rachitsky, Zevi Arnovitz
[00:07:27] S0: I love that so much. I feel like that should be the goal for my podcast. If you're like, "I love that guest." It's less of a win. If it's just like, "Oh, I'm so inspired to do the thing that they figured out, that is the real win." I love, Claude is the best. [00:07:41] S1: I agree. [00:07:42] S0: Okay. So let's dive in and give people, let's start with kind of a high level overview of how you operate and you use AI in your job. What are the core tools and just what's kind of like the frame of reference for the workflow that you figured out and how you operate? [00:07:56] S1: This all started where I was a project's power user. I love projects, GPT projects. [00:08:03] S0: ChatGPT projects?
00:08:03 · Zevi Arnovitz
[00:08:03] S1: Yeah, exactly. GPT projects and Claude projects, which are basically a shared folder of chats which share both custom instructions and shared knowledge base. And I think it was around when GPT started using memory where I thought it was interesting, but it really annoyed me because I do a bunch of different things. I'm a terrible runner, I'm a PM, I was a student, psychology student, so I had all these different facets of life. And what happened was the memory feature was mixing stuff up. So like I talked to GPT about running and it would say, "Oh yeah, after this 5K, you're going to crush all your next product reviews." And it's like, okay, I understand that you have that in your memory, but it's just not relevant. And projects basically allows you to compartmentalize and have things within the right context. So tracking back to the story I told when we came back from Japan, I started building this app. The first thing I noticed was that these products were built in a way where, and when I say these products, I mean Bolt and Lovable, were built in a way where they were super eager to write code. So their system prompt was you're a coding agent. So when you'd write something, they'd straight away start coding. So at the beginning of a project, this was super fun and exciting because they just go and start building your app. But later on when things got more complex, this created much more problems because planning is really important when you're implementing something technical and let's say you're implementing payments or something that's going to be a change to your database. If the coding agent is just like, "All right, I got it." And just starts writing code, this always results in terrible things, some really gnarly bugs that I had. And to mitigate this, what I did was I created sort of a CTO. So again, I'm not technical. I have been in product for a while, but I know zero stuff about code. So basically what I did was I created a CTO with the custom prompt of it being the complete technical owner of the project. So I told it, "I own the problem. I own how we want the users to feel. You're the complete owner of how this is going to be built. I want you to challenge me. I don't want you to be a people pleaser." All these things that kind of mitigate the regular ChatGPT-isms.
00:10:28 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
I always think about this where for some reason, the easiest way for me to think about AI is to imagine it as people. And I think ChatGPT would probably be the worst CTO because it's such a people pleaser and it's so sycophantic where ... Just a short story I had a few weeks ago, I was trying to learn about Bun JavaScript, which was acquired by Anthropic and I was trying to understand what they do. So I was talking to GPT and this wasn't within my co-founder CTO project and I asked it if it's similar to a different framework that I have in my app called Zustand, which nothing to do at all with what Bun JavaScript does. And basically GPT goes, "Oh yeah, it's exactly the same." And then it started talking about what it meant and I was like, "Wait, no, these are not the same at all." And it said the most terrifying and hilarious thing. He goes, "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were just making this up and I was riffing with you." And I was like, "Oh no, no, no, this is terrible." So basically if regular ChatGPT was a CTO, that would be the CTO who goes along with your dumbest ideas. So creating the project allowed me to mitigate that. [00:11:40] S0: So this is, just to be super clear, you have a ChatGPT project that you've given a prompt to be your CTO of your product and being a non-technical person, this is kind of like the thing you talk to when, and we'll get to what you're actually using to build when you have questions about architecture and decisions that are technical.
00:12:00 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:12:00] S1: Yeah. So now I'll show my full workflow and I don't involve GPT anymore, but I definitely would recommend, even though the technology has gone ... So when I started this, there was no plan mode or ask mode. It was just build on these products on Lovable and Bolt, and they've progressed a ton. A lot of what I had as workflows have become ingrained in these products, which is really interesting. I would still recommend start with a project for, first of all, the reason that I said, and also it kind of puts you in a place where you're in a chatbot and not writing code. So you take the time to converse and to learn, which I think is critical. And the second thing is if you're non-technical like me, code is terrifying. It's the scariest thing in the world to look at, and I look at it as kind of like exposure therapy. I think if you see this where I'm working like in Claude or in Cursor, you might be excited to start using those, but I would really recommend starting slow with a GPT project, beautiful UI, super simple, then maybe graduate to like a Bolt or a Lovable, and then go to Cursor in light mode, slowly, slowly, gradually ease in until you open a terminal, go full dark mode, go full dev. So I would really recommend doing this gradually. [00:13:19] S0: That is awesome advice. And so just to be clear, these days you're using Cursor with Claude Code powering it. And what I love about that is that you've never written code. The way you put it, you're afraid of even looking at code. [00:13:33] S1: Yeah, 100%.
00:13:33 · Zevi Arnovitz, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:13:33] S1: Yeah, 100%. [00:13:33] S0: You can do exposure therapy, and I love that Cursor is useful to you. And what you're telling us is that graduating from a ChatGPT project that is kind of your technical co-founder kind of taught you enough to feel more comfortable going straight to cursor. You said that you actually went to Bolt and Lovable kind of in the interim and then you went just straight to Cursor. What's the reason to just go straight to Cursor? Is it just Cursor can do everything and once you get the hang of it, it's actually the most powerful tool? [00:14:02] S1: Yeah, I think I graduated from each tool when I kind of outgrew it. So Bolt was awesome until I was trying to connect payments to my app and I kind of started losing it and then I graduated to Cursor and I've actually fallen in love with Claude. So I'm using Claude Code, but that also runs within Cursor, and I think this is Tal who told me this. I'm not sure who he's quoting, but code is just words at the end of the day. So it's just files on your computer. So basically you can be working on the same project and carry it from app to app. And especially now, I can work with multiple models and apps on my project. So start slow, but definitely there's a lot of places you can graduate to. [00:14:42] S0: Awesome. Okay. Should we dive into screen share showing how you operate? [00:14:47] S1: Awesome. I pulled up cursor. Can you see it? [00:14:49] S0: Mm-hmm.