When people say they had bad workflows or bad outputs,
it's because we're relying on the model to be like us. It's not. We need to be very, very, very, very, very explicit.
We're not going to allow the model to be creative. And with these agents, there's what looks cool and there's what works. I used to have a bookkeeper. I don't have a bookkeeper anymore because I literally dumped
all my statements. And then I asked them, look at the transactions
and look at what sounds like a restaurant or a food spot, and then remove that. Let's say that someone's watching this and they want to build their first AI agent that's actually productive.
What in your mind
is the step one? Awesome. You know what? I'm just gonna open Codex,
and we're going to go through it together.
Okay. So a lot of you will be watching and seeing this show for the first time, and so I wanted to ask for a quick favor, and that's to subscribe to the channel.
And if you do, the promise that I'll make is we're gonna take everything that we do here to the next level. That means scale the guest, scale the storytelling,
the production,
every little detail
of what makes this show great so that we bring you an even better experience.
You hit that subscribe button,
we make this show better for you. Do we have a deal?
Let's get back to the show. Here's where I wanted to begin.
Because you and I, we had a conversation before this,
and I think for most people that I speak to that I've tried using AI agents,
it's not actually making them more productive.
Like, it's not saving them time. It's not helping them make money or increase their output.
And so if someone is listening with that feeling
and with that experience
of using AI agents,
what is gonna be the value to them of listening to this conversation to the end?
Yeah. I think there's a lot of, like, um,
bad information out there on how to use these tools.
Um, a lot of times, people are scaling for what looks cool, but really what you want is to scale for productivity.
And just like in anything in life, simplicity always wins. And with these agents, when you use them with a simplistic mindset, when you have an end goal in mind, and we're gonna, you know, discuss that and architect that together, you start to realize, oh, this is actually a productive tool. Right? A lot of people are attaching 15 different workflows from other people, not learning how to build their own. So if there's one thing I want people to get from this podcast is they get an agent, and they know how to build a workflow that works for them. It might not work for me and you, but it's gonna work for them. And at the end of the day, that's what matters. My workflow is mine, and yours is yours.
You know what? What you just mentioned,
and I know that you and I spoke about this,
it's actually, like, a contrarian
take
because most videos creators
content that we see is people that are using, like, 50 different agents
that the architecture and the system is incredibly complicated and complex.
Why is it that you have this different perspective? Like, why is it that simplicity actually wins here?
Yeah. So my mom always told me to be nice, so I'm gonna be nice to people who have contrarian takes.
It's either one or two things. Um, complexity looks cool. Right? Like, when you have, like, 15 different sub agents, I'm sure, like and I'll do it too from time to time. I'll feel like Iron Man, like Tony Stark. Right? But when it comes to actually being productive, there's what looks cool and there's what works. Right? And what works oftentimes is boring. I'm sure you would say in business with all the people you've interviewed in yourself, sometimes it's the boring stuff that gets to the finish line. It's literally no different with using these tools. It's a matter of a lot of people, especially on YouTube, and I'm a YouTuber. Right? Like, I do content.
The extravagant stuff gets clicks, and it's cool, and it's and it's fun, and it, you know, sort of paints this picture of a future that we can maybe have thousands of agents doing, like, you know, thousands of things, and you're just home sipping a pina colada.
Uh, but the truth of the matter is when you want to use these agents, there's a couple things that are misunderstood.
A, they're very powerful.
B, they're very smart. C,
this sounds contradictory,
they're also very dumb, and, d, your influence matters a lot more than you think. Right?
When you take all this into consideration, 15 sub agents don't make sense because you're not doing 15 things at the same time. Right? So I hope, like, in this pod, we sort of have, like, a mindset shift. People give it a week or two to test this out, and they come back to this video and be like, you know what? The guy with the messed up here was right.
I love it. You know what? Because you you talk about the the mindset shift,
and I think it's important.
Can you just make it clear for people?
If they're able to go through that mindset shift and some of the things that you and I speak about over the next eighty or ninety minutes, they're able to implement,
what is gonna be the tangible impact
in their lives? Like, what is it that they're gonna feel once this is implemented?
Yeah. So, like, the first thing is you're actually going to see productivity with these tools, right, depending on, like, your personal work and stuff like that. Like, if you're a super busy person with a business and you have fifteen, twenty adamant things, then you're gonna love this. If you're someone who's just getting started out, you might see some value in some of the things. But the one thing I I look at and I think of is, like,
investing in in in knowledge of these tools and how they work and sort of understanding high level how models and agents and stuff work feels like an investment for the future. Right? So, like, we can imagine next year from now based on the last year's growth, the models are gonna get better, the tools are gonna get better, agents are gonna be all over the place. It it it seems like anyone who's made an investment now in learning these things will be well equipped for the future. Right? So it's not just a now thing in my opinion. It's also sort of prepping for the future. Because I remember last year messing with these tools. A lot of them were garbage. Right? Like, they were so bad. But, you know, we kept like, people like me kept tinkering because you saw, like, okay. At some point, this thing's gonna get good, and now it's really good. So imagine where will we be six months, a year from now. So we're gonna experience,
um, how to craft specific workflows and skills and all these thing things, and I'll explain all of that. But we're also sort of future proofing our mind so that when the latest and greatest tool comes, there's parallels we can draw from the previous tools that we've used. Yeah. You know, I think I think it's so good, and and you make that point about super proofing
your mind
and, like, being ready for the future.
And so one thing, because you mentioned this when we spoke earlier, you said, I happen to be in a position
that gives me unique insight on all of the stuff that's happening with AI
and the software changes that we're experiencing.
When you say that, I happen to be in a position that gives me a unique insight.
Can you describe what that means?
Or can you explain what that means? Yeah. So there's there's two things. First and foremost, you're not gonna get a biased take from me because none of these companies pay me. And the job I'm in, uh, I work for a back end as a service company that a lot of AI applications integrate to. Um, I see a lot of the progress made. I I, like, I see a lot of the updates made. I'm also very much a person who doesn't go outside. I go outside on Sundays for church. Other than that, like, my free time is spent reading the latest papers, seeing the latest updates, trying the latest tools. Right? So with, uh, when you take mere obsession
plus my day job plus my content plus me, uh, not being bought by any of these companies, again, you know, pray for me. Hope hopefully, it happens.
Yeah. I I I I have a unique perspective that's not biased, and, you know, I'll call garbage what's garbage, and I'll call great what's great. Yeah. You know what, Mike? Because you make you make the point that you're deeply inside this world. Like, you spend all of your time doing this.
I think also the thing that I respect from you and why we I invited you on the show, like, I wanted you to do an episode with us,
is you don't gatekeep information. You know, like, you you share information
to people that are just starting out or even if they're more into this sort of thing.
Can you just share with people
why are you so open
about sharing the information that you do? Because you're you're directly benefiting from using all of these tools, like, in your life. You don't necessarily have to share it. So so why are you so open in that? I remember getting into the space, Like, I felt really dumb. Like, I felt like, oh, man. All these people are so smart. They're so intellectual.
Like like, they use all these big words. Like, they they construct these sentences that I have no understand no understanding in terms of what it means. And I remember, like, especially, like, early, like, 2021, 2022, I would watch videos by really, really smart people. We're talking about, like, developers, researchers, all that stuff, and I would force myself
to listen to them. And this is pre chat, GPT. Then I would Google what they said trying to understand what it is they meant. So I went through a very painful process of learning,
and I realized, oh, a lot of this stuff isn't really that hard. It just sounds hard.
Um,
and I I shared the story with you. Part of how I started the YouTube channel was I I was looking for a developer job, and, like, it just felt like no one was hiring or my resume wasn't good enough. So I I was like, okay. Maybe if I record a video of me explaining really deep technical concepts,
um, that the recruiter watches and they see and they understand, then maybe they'll be like, okay. This guy's smart, they'll push me, like, to the forefront. That never happened. But what happened was that YouTube channel started to pick up. Um, and then I saw that, oh, people actually wanna learn about this stuff. Right? Like, a lot of people find technology
fun,
but it just feels like it it's above them, they don't understand, and they don't wanna make the investment in understanding.
And, yeah, I just kinda made it like a thing where I was like, you know, I'm
gonna explain it to one of the homies. Right? Like, I record my videos as if, uh, my bro or one of the homies from church was watching,
And I guess that's helped a lot of people, so I'm very thankful for that. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's awesome. And I I I love the intention. Like, you can feel it in your work.
You know what, Mike? I just wanna I wanna get straight into it.
And
in particular, because we started it off in this conversation,
and this has been to be transparent,
this has been my experience.
Because a few weeks ago, we record an episode with our mutual friend, Riley Brown,
and he talks about OpenClaw and how he's using it in his business and how how he has all these agents. And so I get super excited. I don't actually start with using OpenClaw.
I start with Claude Cowork,
and I spend a few hours setting up this workflow that's gonna help me do content or in my business with Claude Cowork.
I set it up. It gives me an output.
So I get to that point where it's given me an output.
The output is mediocre
at best.
From that point, basically, from four weeks ago, I haven't used it again. And I think that that's like a common experience.
And so
for people like me,
what is the thing that we're like misunderstanding
or doing wrong when it comes to building these AI agents where we're not actually getting a useful output at the end of this long process?
Okay. Real quick. If you're watching this video, I'm sure at some point you've had to create a presentation in your life. And if you're a non designer like myself,
then that probably was not a good experience.
The funny story is I actually started my career in consulting
and I would only work in building presentations
for clients, and it'd be this horrible manual experience.
It would be so frustrating trying to get everything to look just right on the slides.
But now with tools like Gamma,
you simply type in a text prompt
and it will design a beautiful presentation
in exactly the way that you want it. And so as an example,
recently I wanted to create a short form content strategy presentation
to share with my team.
And so I simply went into Gamma. I selected one of their templates,
and I described how I wanted this presentation to look. And so what I asked Gamma to do was to build me a short form content presentation
using some of the strategies from the top podcasts in the world. And you can see here what it came up with, and I actually think it's pretty impressive. You can see we have the platform strategy,
even created this checklist for choosing viral clips, and you can see it looks great.
And so if you wanna create good professional looking presentations
without all of the manual design work that typically comes with it, then go to the link in the description and check out Gamma.
That's Gamma using the link in the description
to get started with them today.
Thank you to Gamma for sponsoring this episode. Let's get back to the show. Yeah. I mean, I could share my screen and, like, diagram this out. Let's do it. It really comes from, um,
like, when you understand how models work,
um, it will all make sense. Right? So you can think of this giant blue box right here as a model. You can it could be Opus, uh, 4.7,
which is Anthropix
latest model, or it can be GPT 5.5,
which is OpenAI's,
uh, latest model. Both are really, really capable and smart models.
The issue
with a lot of people and how they use it is a lot of people
think the model is similar to them in a sense where, you know, the model kinda sounds like us, acts like us. You might hear these stories where, like, oh, they did some testing and the model they got the model to blackmail one of the users and all that stuff. It it feels very human like,
but it's not.
And understanding this is important because when you understand where it lacks and where it's great at, it becomes a great copilot.
Right? I think agents are a great copilot. You're still the pilot. You're still in charge, uh, but they're a great toolkit.
Now one of the interesting things about how models work is they actually,
um, don't think the way you and I think. Models,
uh, predict tokens. Now a lot of people are gonna hear this and be like, oh, this nerd is about to speak some jibber jabber and it's gonna confuse me. I I I promise all this will make sense.
Tokens are basically
numbers,
like weird looking
and these numbers are plotted on a graph. If anybody remembers in grade ten, eleven, or nine, whatever, like, year it was, like, at math class, we'd have to draw these graphs, and then we have to plot them, and it was annoying. And I was like, why is this ever useful? It so happens that the researchers who build these models needed that stuff. So glad to hear that at least some of those things were useful.
So what the model does, it it understands
and predicts tokens. What does that mean? Let's say,
Callum, I prompt what is the capital
of France.
Right? This is my prompt. What is the capital of France? You and I know that the capital of France is Paris. It's been taught to us. We have it stored in our brain, like, in in some part of the memory layer of our brain, and we know this instantly.
The way model works a model works is it's going to when I type in this text, it's going to convert this text to a bunch of numbers like this. Again, how it converts? It doesn't even matter. I don't even know. But it's gonna convert these number these texts to the numbers. It's gonna plot the number on the graph.
Mathematically, and this is impressive,
the closest answer,
which is Paris,
happens to be a number very close on the graph. So that's what the model does. It doesn't think it doesn't, like, ponder the way you and I do. It literally maps words on a graph and finds the nearest one.
I'm going someplace with this. It's going to map it, and then it's gonna be like, oh, the answer is Paris.
There's even another test right now, um, especially with the Anthropic model. You can ask it. Um, I want to wash my car.
There's a car wash 50 miles away.
It's faster for me to walk than drive. What should I do? The model will tell you to walk.
I'm going to car wash to wash my car, but the model will tell you to walk. So the the reason why I say this is the model does not think the way you and I think. So when you understand this, you have to understand
the prompts that you give it, the text that you enter, the messages, the workflow, whatever it is that you construct has to be good. It it like, the quality of input has to be good because when the quality of input is good, the quality of output will be good. But if we talk to the model the way you and I talk to each other where there might be sarcasm,
there might be context of understanding based on a relationship,
You know, I can say something to you, and based on the context of our our relationship, it can mean totally something different than if I say it to somebody else.
In the same way, the model is not human at all. It sounds human. It acts human. It's been trained on so much data where you think it's conscious, but it's not. So when you understand this, you understand you have a really smart,
but at the same time dumb machine.
So when people say they had bad workflows or bad outputs,
it's because we're relying on the model to be like us. It's not. At its current state, it magnifies the abilities, the wisdom, and the knowledge that you have. So if you're someone who says, I I don't need to read books anymore,
ta da. You gotta keep reading more and kinda gotta keep growing more knowledge.
But this is how models work. So when you understand this, it's going to help, like, especially when we start to craft a workflow. It's going to help us craft a workflow because we're gonna understand we need to be very, very, very, very, very explicit. We're not going to allow the model to be creative. We're going to give it our creative sauce, and we're going to want it to replicate that. Just so just one thing, Mike, before you before you go on, because I think this is so good and important.
When you say, um, it really comes down to, like, the the prompts and, like, the inputs.
Right? It's like good inputs versus bad inputs.
Mhmm. Can you crystallize for people exactly
like, what is the distinction between what makes a good input
or how someone can know if they're giving the AI a good input versus a bad out input?
Yeah. I I could explain that. So let's say we have this line,
uh, where on this spectrum,
this is a person. They have no agency.
Right? And on this end of the spectrum,
they have very
much agency. I know that just broke English. I apologize.
Um,
but, basically, let's say this individual like, we're looking to hire somebody.
And as a business, we obviously want someone who has, like, you know, a lot of agency. And to have agency means you're given a problem. You might not have all the context,
uh, but you go out of your way to get the context. Um, you have this feedback loop where you keep on iterating on this feedback loop, and at some point, you're going to achieve success. Right? Like, for example, if I hired an assistant,
uh, one thing that I may do, and I'm gonna show us how to do, is generate
a a report
for sponsored
videos. Now I'll give context on this. I run a YouTube channel, and one thing I use AI for is after a video's gone live, especially if it's a sponsored video,
I'm going to send out a report of how the video performed. Right? Like, sponsor
wants to see if they got a good investment on their money. Now if I told this to a very high agency person,
they're probably gonna research, okay. What does reports in the YouTube space look like? Right? What things do I need to report? Is it just views, or is it link clicks? Do I calculate a specific thing? Right? Someone who has high agency will go through the motions, will probably continue to iterate on a specific thing and generate a report that might be decently good. Someone with low no agency will probably be like, yeah. Like, here's the video. Here's the link clicks. Done. Right? So, um, we we we see this as humans. Right? Like, you you wanna work with, like, the very high agency people and the, you know, the ones who, like, make the right decisions, ask the right questions.
Models
are somewhere here.
Right? And the reason why I say this is it is going to like, it it will produce the amount of effort you give it in the question you ask.
Right? So if I say generate a report for a sponsored video,
it's going to generate it as if someone with no agency did.
But
if I, let's say, change the prompt to
generate a report
for
a video.
Right? And then I add let me just make this a long line. I add,
um,
let me add a new line. First, get
YouTube views,
then get
link clicks,
then calculate
CTR,
then generate
HTML
page for me to view
the stats.
So
this
explanation
and this get generate a report for a video,
to me and you, especially if maybe we've worked together, you know, we're both creators,
generate a report for a video might make sense to us.
But to someone who has no agency, you're gonna have to give them step by step direction.
The model is pretty much the same way. You're going to have to be very like, you have to think of this as a very junior,
no agency person, but that is very capable and has all the knowledge in the world consumed
in their brain.
So this has to, uh, the the the the way you prompt has to shift, you can't give it one liners. You can't, uh, say just do this for me. It doesn't know you or understand you. Right? You're going to have to give it step by step by step instruction
at least one time. And then I'm gonna show us later down in the in in in in the video how we can take this,
convert this to what's called a skill.
This is stored
in the agent, and the agent can call this again and again when it needs to. But the very first time, like hiring a new employee, we're going to need to train them. And this is the big difference on, like, good inputs versus bad inputs. Yeah. You know what? You you just made the point, and I think it's actually the perfect way to look at it, and it's what made it click for me. 100%.
100 per like, that's literally the perfect analogy.
Yeah.
Okay. Where do we go to next? So there's
I would say there's a spectrum,
um, when it comes to these agents,
and the spectrum,
um, really is
diff the difficulty. Right? How difficult
is it to set up? We'll actually just have one line here. How difficult is it to set up? If, like, this is super
difficult
and then this is, uh, easy,
uh, the following agents
fall as follows.
OpenAI
and,
um,
OpenAI Codex and, uh, Anthropic,
their tool,
I would say, is somewhere,
like, not in the like, not on the easy spectrum, but somewhere, like, right here. Meaning, um, there is, like, a back and forth. Um, there is, like, a cost of time,
um, that you're going to put. But I believe, like, especially after we go through an example,
um, you're going to feel like this is super easy.
These OpenClaws,
Hermes, these, like, new agents,
I would say, especially for someone nontechnical,
are on the difficult side, uh, when it comes to I'll just say OpenClaw and Hermes, are on the difficult side when it comes to setting up. But, like, using them directly,
um, the setup is a bit difficult. Now there's pros to that. The pros to that is I can have a really highly customizable
agent, like, to the core, like, personality,
how it works. Like, everything is fully customizable, and I own, like, the code. With open ananthropic,
you're sort of tied to an ecosystem. You're tied to specific model.
Um, so these are the pros and cons.
For
first timers or people who are not technical or people who are giving this, like, a try and you're pretty early on, I
before we chatted, I was like, oh, coworker seems to be the one, but I've changed my mind. I think Codex OpenAI's
OpenAI's
Codex
is the best place to start. A, if you have an itch to build an application, a web or a mobile application, it's a great place to do so. But b, they've started to really focus on
this concept of being like a super app where you can use it for knowledge work. Uh, you can use it for workflows and tasks. You can connect it to external
tools.
And that way, you get the both of the best of both worlds where I can maybe develop apps one day if I want to, or I can also automate my life and my business and my personal if I want to. Right? So, um, for today's video and probably for the near future, um, I would say Codex is the best bang for your buck. So so so, Mike, before we get into it, because this is interesting,
you and I spoke, I wanna say, three days ago, two days ago.
I wanna understand
and and and when you and I spoke initially, you said that, um,
your belief was that for beginners looking to start out, the easiest tool and the simplest way to get started if you wanna use AI agents is Claude Cowork.
And so I wanna understand, what is it that has happened
in these last three days that your thinking has shifted? Because I know Codex,
the developments that they've made to are actually pretty new. Like, it's getting better all the time.
What has happened that your position has shifted?
So the biggest one the biggest one is the subsidy of credits.
What that means is, like, when you subscribe to the o to the Codex $100 a month plan or $200 a month plan or $20 a month plan, and same thing for Anthropic, you're not actually getting $200
of value. You're getting, like, 3 to $5,000
worth of compute. For example, the Claude, uh, $200 subscription,
you are technically getting $5,000
worth of compute. Meaning, they are viscerally burning money. Um, you are getting, like, the best value on the $200 month subscription.
Recently, the last couple of days and especially, like, the last two days, um, Anthropic
has been, like, cutting down on this. Right? And
OpenAI, on the other hand, has been increasing rate limits. Right? So when I look at this from a cost perspective,
if both of them are equally just as good, what I want is I want to use the platform that's going to give me the most compute. Meaning, I can keep going back and forth with it, and I don't get rate limited. I don't have to wait till next week to use it again.
And OpenAI's
rate limit, Codex's rate limit, is extremely,
extremely generous. Right? So because I have no loyalty to any of these applications because none of them pay me, I'm going to pick the best one for my pockets.
And that's when I was testing both of them yesterday.
Codex's rate limits were just great. And to your point, they pushed a lot of updates recently. So it like, based on all that, it felt like the best choice to recommend. So so simply
put,
Codex at this point in time that you and I are speaking
will allow someone to build more,
to to go back and forth with it more, to build more things for the same or similar price than what Anthropic did with Claude Cowork or Claude Code. Yes. Exactly. You're going to get more value for the for the subscription you subscribe to with, uh, OpenAI. Before we get deeper into it and how you would go about building your first,
like, AI agent using codex that's actually productive
and useful, whether that's making money or saving you time.
Can you just share some examples with people
of what codex is actually capable of? Like, use cases that you've seen either for yourself
or with peers, friends, creators,
uh, people online
of, like, what they've been able to build with Codex.
For mine, there's a couple of things. First and foremost,
the, uh, biggest, like, time sync for me,
um, was
going back and forth, uh, was not even going back and forth. It was researching
sponsors. Right? There are a lot of people that will email me, especially in the space I'm in, uh, because, like, everyone's building an AI now. There's, like, thousands of emails I get per day. Like, my email, unfortunately, is has been vicinerated.
So I have this one specific workflow
where
every single day, right, around, I would say, 10AM,
uh, I have a workflow that does the following.
Check my emails.
Right?
Check
if any email so first, it's gonna check my emails, then it's gonna check if any email,
um, is from a potential
sponsor.
Now the agent's able to catch this because usually they'll put it in the subject line or be in one of the emails. Like, it's pretty easy to catch the sponsor.
I'm about to share some secret sauce. I probably shouldn't have, but I'm I'm gonna share some secret sauce. Then what my agent's going to do is it's going to research if the company's raised the money.
I'm gonna show why.
If the company has raised
money.
First and foremost,
um, in
this AI space, dev tool space, software space,
especially for my niche,
um, which is, like, technical and nontechnical
people, more so technical people,
um, that's a valuable audience. Right? And a lot of the companies that wanna sponsor a channel like mine raise
are raising a lot of money now. And if, obviously, you raise the money, there's two things. First and foremost, you're a legit company. Right? So we've verified legitimacy
here. Well, most likely, there's I'm sure there's scams that raise money, but the likelihood of it being a legit company is high, number one. And number two, they have money to spend, so the price is gonna be high. Uh,
so I get my agent to do this, and then my agent has its own email. Right? I use a tool called agent mail, and I'll explain, like, different tools to integrate, uh, later in the video. My agent has its own email,
and then it's going to email me,
and this is a private email I have that no one has access to but my agent. It's going to email me if the sponsor
is worth it.
So what this does is this is basically checking
if the email I got from a sponsor,
is it worth it, or is it not? Like, is it worth looking into it? Is it worth responding?
And I would say
nine times out of 10, this works.
Right? The first few times I had to really massage it. Right? There were a couple rules I added. For example,
most likely, a sponsor that hits me up with an @gmail.com
could be, like, a scam because there are scams out there. Like, there's a friend of mine who's a YouTuber who connected
to a landing page that was like, oh, connect to your YouTube to so he can see your analytics, and, like, he got hacked. Right? So I have to be careful with these things. So something like this saves me a ton of time. Another one, and this is the one we're going to build, is the sponsor report. And the reason why I like these is because this is the type of workflow
that everyone watching this can set up today. There is some sort there's data in your life that is scattered between multiple sources that can be aggregated together to be used a piece of information that is valuable to you. Right? Reports aren't just boring old documents. It's an aggregation of information
that should be useful to you. And the report that I generate is you get YouTube views,
right, for a specific video,
views for a video.
You're going to get link clicks for the sponsor.
You're going to calculate
all the
nerdy marketing CTRs.
I don't even know half what half that stuffs mean, uh, and other metrics.
Generate a HTML page.
Right? This,
again, was something that I dreaded that I had to do. And it also got to a point, you know, praise the Lord, I started to grow and a lot of sponsors started to hit me up. And I thought, you know, I'm an agent. I don't get tired. Let me accept 15 of these. And now I'm overwhelmed. I have 15 different things to generate. This saved me a ton of time, made me super productive.
And this is the best example I wanna go with because, again, I don't want people to watch this. If you're watching this, I don't want you to watch this and build the same thing that I built. What I want you to see is I I purposely picked an built an example, uh, picked an example that's going to show you how to think about it, and then I want you to dream. I want you to like, whatever it is in your life, you could build a workflow and to build that. Yeah. You know, it's such a good breakdown, and and a few things that just listening to you,
use cases that came to mind. I'm even just thinking and and you confirm or deny. This has just came to my mind. Even if people are looking to kinda track their, uh, like, personal expenses
in, like, a more systematic,
uh, way. If you're looking to get into content creation, you post on Instagram
and you wanna get, like, weekly, monthly, I don't know, quarterly updates
on, like, your analytics, what's working versus what's not working.
To your point, there's so many places in our life where we're getting
data or information
that we're not tracking.
It could even be, like, meeting notes from, uh, like, your weekly meetings at work. You want it condensed into a brief.
No. Even food that you're eating, like, you like, you said it perfectly. Like, you know how there are these expense tracker apps that you gotta take the picture and stuff? You can use the agent. You can literally take a bunch of pictures of your receipts throughout the day, dump it into the agent, and tell it, oh, put it in a spreadsheet, and you could download that spreadsheet. Like, anywhere you can ingest information,
it can be turned into something valuable.
And that's what I want people to think of when they think of workflows.
Think of all this information that exists around you, uh, around your business and personal life. Ask yourself, are you efficient with the information? The answer is no. And if the answer is no, how can I feed this to an agent
and produce something actionable
that is actually beneficial? Whether it's condensed information or it's actual work done. Like, that's like if people can think about that, then, you know, this is a w episode. You know what? Mike, here's here's where I wanna go,
which is
let's say that someone's watching this. They have a few hours, you know, coming up this weekend
or like a free evening,
and they want to build their first AI agent that's actually productive.
Like, either takes work off their plate or helps them do more in less time.
What in your mind is the step one? Like, where should they begin if they're gonna use Codex?
Yeah. So there's two things, and, like, I I want people to make an honest assessment of themselves.
Step one,
if you
are
like, point number point one point I wanna make, if you are delusional,
column shirt shirt says, meaning,
you you you just have this drive where you're going to figure like, you don't need to be motivated to do things. You're going to drop to step number two, which is we're gonna build a workflow.
We're going to build a workflow.
But if you're someone who needs a little bit of motivation, you need to watch a David Goggins video before you get into it. I'm actually going to tell you to open Codex
and create a random app.
Here's why I say this, and I know this has nothing to do with workflows.
The reason why I say this is I found, uh, Calum, especially with people who are nontechnical,
when they just create something random. It doesn't have to be polished. It doesn't have to be finished. It doesn't have to be live. But when they create something random and and they see it and, like, it's functional,
the dopamine hit you get is the equivalent to whatever class a substance is popular now. Like, there is just this excitement and drive and, like like, I remember I I got one of my church friends to do this, and he
hasn't stopped since.
Right? So if you are someone who is like, man, I've tried these tools.
I'm just I'm tired.
You're gonna open Cortex. I'm gonna show people how to do that. Um, but for anyone else, um, who's just ready to go, there's a couple there's one specific tool we're gonna need. Now a lot of people don't share this tool, so I'm gonna share this tool.
And this tool is called Composeo. You're gonna go to composeo.dev,
and you're going to make an account. What Composeo does is Composeo
becomes
and
this is gonna be a new term for people. It's gonna it's called a tool router.
And, basically, what this becomes is this becomes
like the layer that allows our AI agent to connect to anything.
So let's say I'm using
OpenAI.
Right? We'll call it OAI,
and I want OpenAI to connect to my analytics platform,
um, called Dubb. Right? I use an analytics platform called Dubb. What Composio does is I give OpenAI instructions
that Composio gives me. OpenAI connects to Composeo.
Composeo
then connects to Dubb,
and then
Composeo feeds that information back to OpenAI.
So now I can give OpenAI access to all the random tools that exist if they're in the compose your directory
while not giving up my password. Right? It's like the ultimate middleman
in a way. Basically, it is the ultimate middleman. It's like the guy with the trench code. What do you need? And they have everything. They have a generous free tier.
This is one of the tools we're going to need. This is going to be basically our main connector. So I would say,
Callum, this is
step number one. When you say connector, Mike, can you just make it clear for people? What is it what does that mean?
So
the agent
can do things,
but it needs access to your information.
For example, let's say I want to give the agent access to my email.
It needs to connect to Gmail
so that it can read my emails. That's what I mean by connectors. Literally, all you do on Google is go OpenAI Codex download.
The URL you're going for is openai.com/codex.
I've already installed it. You can install it, and then this is what the app looks like.
That being said, plug ins is basically how you connect external
services,
external tools to,
um,
Codex. Now I can see here they have one that allows me to control my Chrome browser.
They have one where I can create and edit spreadsheets.
I can create an edit presentation.
So, again, even looking at this, I can start of already think of things like, oh, I could do my taxes, whatever.
I could connect to my Notion. Right? This is pretty cool. Now let's say I wanted to connect my Notion, how I would do it? I would click the plus button,
and then blah blah blah blah blah. I'm just going to tell it to reference memories in chat, meaning I want it to remember the stuff it's done. And I literally click install,
and it's going to basically connect my Notion. So this is what
connectors are. Yeah. So so just to make this, um,
clear for people,
when they start using codex,
OpenAI
already has plugins
like connectors
with a bunch of companies.
Like, typically, the biggest companies, your Gmail,
Notion,
like things that you would use.
Where Composio comes in is Composio
so that is OpenAI connecting directly with this third, like this other third party company.
Composio is like this middleman
that you can
it will have the integrations
with your,
yes, your Notion
and maybe, I don't even know, like an Instagram
or
Gmail. Someone using NetSuite. Right? Like, something random. Yeah. Right? Like,
they're not going to build a NetSuite integration because it's probably not popular. Maybe it is. I'm wrong.
Co Compozio,
their whole business model is there's thousands of tools that these companies don't care about. We're going to make it easy to connect. So if something isn't
in the official plug in directory,
guess what I'm going to use? I'm going to use Composeo.
Yeah. So you you get access to more plug ins.
Base. How how do you actually integrate
how is Composeo integrated?
Yeah. I'm gonna go to composeo.dev.
Right? This is their website. Oh, very fancy fancy.
I'm gonna create an account.
And,
um, when you are onboarding, they're going to give you two options. They're gonna say, is this for you? Meaning, do you wanna connect apps to your AI client,
or are you building a platform? Right? Platforms for the developers looking to build on top of Composeo.
What you and me want is the for you. So I'm gonna click on for you, and you're going to see it tells me, welcome back, Michael.
Um, explore what's possible.
You can see here it says the most used app is YouTube. I connected YouTube,
um, to my coding agent, and I'm gonna show an example of how you connect apps.
There's a plethora of cool things here. You can actually click on connect apps, and you can, like, look at I mean, I'm scrolling, and I'm scrolling really hard.
Like, there is a lot. Right? Like, I'm still scrolling. I'm still
I I I think I I even just saw
Polymarket. Right? Like, if someone wants to connect their agent to Polymarket,
you can. Right? But how do I make this connection?
The way you do it is you click on install.
Right? And it gives you actually a couple options. Do you wanna use this with OpenClaw? Do you wanna use this with Claude Cowork or Claude Code?
Or do you wanna use this with Codex?
And all you have to do is I'm gonna click install.
Any of these work, but I'm just gonna show you what is going to work the smoothest for you. You're gonna click on MCP,
and you're gonna click on API key.
And then you're going to I'm going to reveal this, uh, but then I'm going to change this. If any of you pesky hackers is watching to see if you got an API key of mine, you did not. You take the same screenshot. So I take this,
reveal this right here,
and then I'm gonna drag this.
And I'm gonna say,
I want you to connect to
Composeo
so I can so, actually, so you can connect to external
tools.
I'm literally this is what you do. You hit enter,
and it sets up itself.
And the reason why this is possible is because the agent
writes code that's going to connect to Composeo.
And Composeo
is built in a way where it gives you access to all these tools. Right? And to show you how
this works,
I'm going to go back to Composio,
and let's say I wanted to connect,
um, what's a good thing to connect to?
Let's say I wanted to connect to cal.com.
I use cal.com every now and then. I'm gonna say, I want to connect
to cal.com
using Composio.
I'm gonna hit enter,
and we're gonna see what happens. What's basically gonna happen is the agent's gonna realize, oh, I have Composeo connection.
Composeo has access to cal.com,
and it's basically going to give me a link to connect to cal.com,
and then Composeo
is going to give Codex
access to it. Yeah. Let me know if that verbiage makes sense. No. It it does make sense. One one thing I wanted to point out, and it's something that I'm noticing as you're going through this, the because this is my first time actually seeing,
uh, Codex
and even, like, its interface.
It's very
similar
and and you let me know, Mike. It's very similar in how it works to just using ChatGPT.
I know I know most people have obviously used ChatGPT,
at least in America.
The functionality feels pretty simple
and intuitive
for someone that's used ChatGPT.
Yeah. And I think what they're going to do is they're probably gonna merge the app. Like, I think Codex is the experiment on, like, developers
and, like, getting them to, like, getting them to see if they like the model. And then because the Chargebee interface is pretty familiar with most people, they're probably just gonna merge the two. Right? So that's what I, again, my honest guess, I think it is. And, yeah, like, into your point, like, it shouldn't terrify you. Right?
It looks the same. It feels the same. It's just a lot more powerful. Now going back to this, it says composeofoundcal.com
toolkit. There's no active connection yet. It says I'm going to start an off flow. So this is basically it trying to connect to the MCP server. I'm going to allow this to happen. The cool thing is, um, these agents won't go rogue without your permission.
It asked me, can I make the connection?
I said yes. Now check this, Callum. It says open this Composeo link to connectcal.com.
I'm going to click this link.
And now what Composeo is basically doing is it's it's basically making me log in to the app. Composeo handles the credential management.
My agent's going to have access to cal.com. So I'm gonna click on allow.
It says successfully connected. Let's go back to
Codex,
and then this is the cal.com account is, uh, active.
I'm doing one read only probe through Composer, so we know the co the connector works beyond just off. Now someone might say, how the heck am I supposed to understand
some of these words? What you do is you copy this, you open a new chat. What does this mean?
Literally, like, it and and this is how I started my career. It's like just asking,
like, the instead of, like, being threatened by the difficult words, asking what they mean. And you'll be surprised,
they actually are very simple. Yeah. I think it's such a great point, you know, especially what you mentioned earlier
about, um, like, future proofing yourself.
So many people that I speak to have this, like, uh, fear and anxiety of being, like, replaced
in the in their job and in their occupation
by AI.
And it's like, yes, these learning how to build with these agents can be incredibly useful right now.
But also
moving forward in the future,
that kind of, like, hustler,
self starter,
self taught mentality
of, like, I come across something that I don't understand.
I take that thing,
I give it back to AI and ask it to explain it, and I learn
is actually, to me, it feels like what's gonna be a key skill,
uh, for people, like, moving forward in this kind of new era of AI that we're going into.
100%.
Because, like, you you have to think about it. Right? Like, just a couple years ago, you were sort of limited by the,
uh, you know,
amount of knowledge and information you have either within yourself or in in close proximity of the people you have. Now for, like, $20 a month, I have PhD level intelligence in front of me. Right? And it would be such a bummer
to not take advantage of this. And even in, like, my development journey, there's a lot of technologies that I would be I would have been afraid to try.
But now I'm so delusional with it. Like, I'll try new things. I'll build random things. Like, my mindset is there's nothing I can't build if I have the right information. Now I have the right information.
Is it going to take time? Of course. It might be painful? Of course. I'm sure everybody watching this knows greatness takes time. Anything worth value takes time, but now I have the information. Information is no longer a blocker. Right? So that's how I would love people to take these tools. Right? Like, to like, the the this tool can help me progress and push forward. Yeah. I I I love what you said. Uh, greatness takes time.
You know what? You mentioned it earlier, like, for that delusional
person.
For the person that's, like, high agency, self starter, just wants to make things happen, wants to build.
You said that the the step one for them would actually be to build a workflow.
And so I wanna talk to that person for a second.
When you're thinking about workflows, I know you have, like, the sponsor agent.
How can someone even decide
what workflows
would actually be
good to have their AI agent
take over? Like, talk me through your process of how you even identify
the workflow
that makes sense to use codex with.
Back back to the diagram. So how to create how to think about workflows? This is how I think about them. Right? A, number one, anything repeated
often.
So if there's any task in your life that's often repeated.
Right?
Um, like, it's checking emails for a specific thing,
whether it's, like, you know, synthesizing specific information,
Anything repeated often
can be and should be a workflow.
Um, number two,
um, and this is I would call this discovery.
You know, data is a gold mine. And believe it or not, most people, because they use 15 different tools, have a lot of data about themselves. Right? Um, most of us are probably not performing
at the level we want to. Right? And there's all these different things that we have to do. So the second type of workflow is what I call discovery, and that is, you know, connect,
you know, every tool
that is important to me. Right? Email being one of them. Notion might be another one. Um, you know, Figma, linear, whatever those tools are.
And, basically, having a discussion
with the agent
on the stuff that you do. Right? And when I say discussion,
it can be
what are some actionable things that you see that I should do from all the information. Right? Like, read my emails, read my this, read my that. What are some actionable things that I can do? Um, generate a report on how much things I've done. Like, the the way I want people to think of workflow is I have all this I have this agent. Right? I have OpenAI Codex right here.
I have all these
pieces of information. Right? I have this right here, this right here. Uh, I have this tool right here. I have this tool right here. I have this tool right here. All these different tools that I'm using,
the way I want people to think is to use this agent
as a synthesizer
for all the external tools they use, combine that information,
and see what productive thing can be done. So a lot of it, unless you have repeated work,
is discovery.
But in discovery, I've noticed a lot of
useful things. For example,
um, I didn't know
that like, when I when I'm talking about discovery, I didn't know that I was spending,
um, I had a lot of emails unread. Meaning, like, I would have this problem of I would open an email.
In my mind, sometimes my mind races so fast. In my mind, I've responded.
I've written the response in my mind and sent it, but I'll go back and I'll do something else. And the one thing, the agent card is, like, there's a lot of opportunity in your emails that you haven't responded to.
Right? Again, not like
it wasn't a thought of a workflow in the moment, but I realized, oh, like, I'm really bad with my emails. Aren't that? So every week, I have a I have a a an agent. Every week, it checks
all the emails that have been sent in that week. Have I missed any opportunity?
Is there anything I need to check? Is there anything,
uh, I need to anyone I need to respond to? And anyone who's emailed me at least twice knows
at least one of those emails I responded a week after that was sent, and that's because the agent reminded me and I responded. Right? So I would think of repeated things first,
and then number two is I would go discovery mode. Connect all the external tools that you use that have your inform like, that you work on, whether it be your email, calendar, whatever it is, and synthesize that information to see what can I improve, what can I automate, what things am I slacking on, what can I do better, am I do I need all these tools? Right?
Think of it like a consultant. Right? Like, it's honestly a great consultant,
uh, when you steer in the right direction. That's how I would think about workflows.
Yeah. You know what? Two two things come to mind because, like, what you said is so good. So so the first thing is and this is what I did,
is actually
so you said anything that's repeated, anything that you're doing weekly.
And so one thing that's helpful in the beginning is actually just starting to document what are the things that you're doing on a weekly basis.
Like, either writing it down or putting it in your notes, and you'll come up with this list. It'll give you the list of just potential workflows off of that. The second thing, and I actually hadn't thought about this,
and you mentioned it with the discovery,
is in this digital world that we're in, we're being bombarded
with so much information,
whether it's like our inbox,
social media,
um, like text messages,
that there's like and it's actually kinda scary to think about all of the things that we're not aware of, like, the thing that we forgot, but it's actually important.
An opportunity
that we were, like, excited about, but we let it drop off, and now it's gotten buried.
And it's funny because one of the things that I'll do,
and maybe this is a use case for me personally, and I'm sure for people that are listening at home,
is when I'm on Instagram,
I will be, like, saving posts.
Like, if I see a post that could be, like, good inspiration
to create content or I wanna respond to, I'll save it. I'll do the same thing on Twitter.
And I just have, like, these
these bookmarks full of posts.
I never look at them again. Yeah. And it's like you could have an agent.
I I think that's like a relatable thing. You could have an agent that's surfacing,
like, learnings or things from these posts so that you can actually use them. And this is why I hate when people
download or use people's specific workflows because you've now limited yourself to their box. Right? The whole point of this is for you to, like, start why and start to figure out what makes sense to you. And and in this case, like, for you, you said, um, that use case made sense. In my case, this use case made sense. Right? So it's just a matter of connect tools,
figure out what to do with this data, something actionable comes out of it. Yeah. I I I think it's such a good point of, like, the whole game is making this work for you.
And so,
Mike, if someone's listening, I wanna go back to, uh,
Codex
for a second.
And I'm thinking about what you mentioned in the beginning, which is, like, most people build AI agents
in completely
the wrong way. Like, they do it the opposite
of how you should. I've even I've heard you talk about that.
Like, they maximize for what looks cool over what's actually productive.
Can you
share?
So I've connected
Codex
with Composio.
Composio has access to all of these plug ins.
What am I
at high level, what am I doing
so that I actually build the agent that's productive?
Connecting
Composio
was as simple as follows. You create an account, and by the way, you can you can do this. If you're like, oh, this is too you can do this. I believe in you. You go to install,
You go to codex.
Click on MCP.
Click API key.
Reveal this. You can copy this and paste it in the chat,
but then I would take a screenshot of this,
and then you send it over to
Codex. Right? And, basically, what I what I tell Codex
is the same thing I did here.
Like, um, where is it at? Right here. I basically dropped the screenshot,
and I basically told it to connect to Composeo.
When it connects to Composeo, this is what's going to happen. It's going to say,
Composeo
is configured locally,
and I also asked it to connect to my YouTube.
Once Composeo is connected, right, that's the first step, connect Composeo.
Number two,
you can go to connect apps on Composeo,
and you can search if your integration exists.
Right? So let's say I wanted to connect Twitter. Let's say I wanted to click connect Perplexity.
Let's say I wanted to connect to Google Docs. In this case, you see I connected YouTube,
and I connected
Dubb. Right? Again, connecting was as easy as this. Like, I'm gonna show you another example. Like, this is the easier easiest part. Like, anyone should be able to do this. I wanna connect dub.co
for my analytics.
I've already connected Composeo. It's as simple as me telling it, let's connect.
It gives me a link.
I click the link,
and then it connects it. In fact, here's the thing. And I'm glad I took a screenshot. I kept this.
I
clicked the link,
and I went to the washroom. I had to freshen up for this interview.
Um, and I took too long, and it said invalid or expired link. Now the nontechnical person is probably gonna see this in panic.
What do you do when stuff like this happens? You take a screenshot and you give it to the agent. And that's exactly what I did. I said, I even apologized. I shouldn't have, but I did. I said, sorry. I took so long. It expired.
And then it said and it fixed it.
And I asked for it to pull some analytics,
and then it did. Right? So
the basically, I'm what I what what the first step is you connect composing. Second is, how do you connect further tools? You literally just have a conversation.
I'll show one more example so people don't think I'm crazy. Let's
connect
you know what? Linear. I'll connect linear. Linear is
a tracking platform for developers on to track progress, like what you've shipped, what you haven't. So I'm gonna show you how easy it is to connect Linear. I'm just gonna start a new chat, and I'm gonna say, please
connect
to Linear.
And I'm gonna send that.
And we're gonna let the agent think,
and the agent is going to give me,
whether it be a link or a button to connect. So this is the first thing that I want people to do is just connect the tools that you use. Don't connect the tools you want to use.
No.
Connect the tools that you already use. Right? So we can see here,
it's saying the linear tool namespace is available. I'm going to make it read only. Oh, I've already connected it before. So it's like, linear is is connected and OAuth is working. Verified Michael Schimulus,
and these are the different teams I'm running. I said it all to say connecting
Calum, I hope I make sense, is literally as easy as telling the agent. You don't have to write code. You don't have to do anything. You tell the agent. You check it, compose. You'll see if it has the tool. Right?
See if it has the tool. If let's say I'm a Shopify store person. There's a Shopify connection.
I can literally say I can go back and say, okay.
Connect
connect to Shopify
now.
And it's the same thing. It's going to check. It's gonna fire off Composeo.
Composeo is going to give me a URL. I authenticate on that URL,
and now I've given eight my agent access
to Shopify.
Does does that make sense before I continue on? Yeah. That makes sense. So beautiful. So I'll just create a new chat. I have a couple things connected.
I have my YouTube
analytics.
I have my YouTube analytics.
I have my Dubb connected.
The one thing that I do is,
again, I generate these reports.
Now I've held off on this tool because this tool
should only be discovered by people who are serious. And if you watch to this point, you're serious.
There's a tool, I don't know if you're familiar with this,
column called WhisperFlow.
Oh, I love WhisperFlow. So I'm using the free tier. And the reason why I love WhisperFlow,
WhisperFlow allows me to voice to voice to text with the agent. So I click on the function button on my keyboard
and I can talk to it. So I can say,
I want to generate a report that basically tracks
the performance
of
sponsored
YouTube videos so that I can use it as marketing material
for sponsors.
Basically, I do a lot of content
and you have a connection so you can see my content and some of the videos are sponsored and you can see the sponsored links
in dubb.co
and there's a connection for that. I wanna generate a a report that basically or some sort of marketing material that I can send to sponsors
so they can send me their hard earned money.
Now typing that would have taken me forever.
But what's cool about WhisperFlow
is there's a lot of information here that sometimes it's hard to distill via typing because it takes too long. I will voice the text the heck out of this. Another thing that you mentioned, Calum, that I'll add and I'll just hit enter with this is
you said, um, to voice to text your day, your thoughts, and I would 100% do that. Right? You can use Notion, some people use Obsidian,
really documenting your work, right, via voice to text and then feeding that into an agent, you'll be surprised how lazy we are naturally,
um, will help you a lot. Right? All these things are very simple, but when you put them together,
you start to become very, very, very, very productive.
I think talking,
a, is a skill that everyone should have. So, I mean, using WhisperFlow almost, like, forces you.
Um, but b, I find, at least for me, I get a lot of information out of myself
when using WhisperFlow.
Um, that being said, I typed in this giant prompt and this agent
is added. Right? It checked Composeo.
It checked the tools. It notices I have 50 recent uploads. It notices that I have 33 links, and now it's trying to match,
um, the videos. Now this will probably fail.
Now the reason why this will fail is I gave it too broad of a task. If it succeeds, I'll be surprised.
If it fails, I'll understand why. And I I'm low key hoping it fails, but if it doesn't fail, then it's just proof that the agent is smart.
But, essentially, what I did was not a good prompt. Yeah. My my my question to you, because you said I think that's really interesting. You said that you gave it too broad of a task.
In your mind, kinda take people behind the scenes.
What is the signal to you
that you've given the agent too broad of a task?
Okay. So give me sixty seconds of your time because you're gonna want to hear this. So I've done over 200 episodes of this show. I've been doing it for four years. In the last six months, I started to notice a shift in the conversations.
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Thank me later. Let's get back to the show. I'm glad you asked, and I have an example for that because I was hoping you're gonna ask it. So I basically, in this prompt said I wanna generate a report that basically tracks this. This is
Pretty pretty general.
But if I go to the last,
where is it? Is this one right here, I want to show you
one interesting thing.
I'm gonna show you the steps I took it.
So I first connected the tools. Right? So you can see here I gave him my API key
and then it says it's configured.
I told it asked it tell me what my last video did in views. This is a very simple prompt.
I want my last video and I want the views. Can't get this wrong.
It says it's currently sitting at 12,000 views, 800 likes, 44 comments.
Simple.
Right? Now the reason why I told it to do this is this action is in the context window. Meaning, uh, it's in the it's in the it's in the mind of the agent.
The next thing I tell it is, let's connect to Dubb, which is my analytics platform.
Gives me the URL.
Remember, I I went to the washroom to fix my hair. Took too long. I said sorry.
But then it connected it. And then look what it did. It says, I verified a sponsor link from your latest video.
Because I asked it to check my video first and it knew that I wanted the analytics for some sort of analytics,
it checked the link that matches.
And it says here, oh, here are the current results. 534
clicks.
This is the destination.
This is the last click. I'm not tracking leads or sales or sales amount.
And then it did it itself. It's like combined with the YouTube number from earlier, the current sponsor
CTR is
4.43%.
Right? Now this prompt is going to feel lazy,
and I'm going to tell you why it works. It's and I said, yes. Now do me a favor. Generate a clean looking page showcasing this number. This is for a sponsor.
I'm allowed to be lazy with this prompt because
I've given it context with the previous conversation.
Right? It's like
I don't have a perfect example, but it's like leading someone on. Right? First, you're like, you know, I really like your shoes.
And then you're like, I really like your t shirt. And you're like, I really like your smile. At some point, you're gonna understand, yeah. This person really likes me. Right? That's essentially what I've done. Right? I first gave it access to my YouTube
video views, and then I I gave it access to my analytics,
and now I'm telling it
generate a report.
And what it does is
and I oh, and here's the thing. I I I tell it to generate a clean looking page.
Here's why I do it. When it generates this page, it's going to write HTML.
HTML
is, uh, is basically a file type. It's what a lot of websites render. This file type is great for agents. Agents excel with HTML and markdown files.
I told it to generate this.
If I click on this right here,
you can see that it generated this report. You know, not too shabby. If I don't like the style, here's what's cool about Codex.
They have an annotation tool. I can click on this annotation tool. I can select something,
and then I can tell it I don't like this font. I don't like this
k? So I can I can go pretty, like, specific with this, but I don't care?
It generated this report and I liked it. Now here is where you don't download people skills, but you create your own. We had a successful run.
So you know what I did, Callum? I said, see,
this right here is a great report. And you could tell I kinda talk it to talk to like, I talk to homies.
I say, can you turn it into a skill where I just tell you the video and you generate these pages?
So I've given it what I want the end result to be, and I've told it what input it can expect from me. What input it can expect from me is a YouTube URL.
What I expect from it is the is this right here.
And this took a second. This took five minutes.
And here's one thing I want people to realize. Sometimes,
the agents will take time. And there have like, for example, in this instance, it was waiting for me to give it access and I didn't. So, right, I have to click allow and it's probably gonna keep on working. But going back to this example, and this is why I generate these examples ahead of time,
because this video would probably been way too long.
You could see it took its time.
I could maybe work on another task. I could maybe do another thing. Again, this isn't my full time job. I have other work to do. But while this is happening, I could go do something else. After five minutes,
it created you could see here, created the reusable skill.
This is very, very important. The reason why this is important is the next time
I want this done,
which I have another example for you,
I can tag it.
So
I can click at on
the text box
and you can see a bunch of these
tags. Like, it it it it it it wants me to tag one of these things. All I have to do is click generate
and you can see this skill. This is the very skill
I created.
So I created this skill and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you actually an action. Yeah. Okay. This video was sponsored. I'm gonna copy this link,
and I'm going to paste it.
So let me paste it here.
Remember, I told the skill earlier. Let me go back.
I told her right here when I generate the skill, can you turn this into a skill? What is it turning into a skill? It's turning the workflow. Basically, the step by step I took. You see a lot of people, Callum, will tell the agent, I want you to do this, I want you to do that, I want you to do that. Turn this into a skill. Wrong.
Have a successful run first
because sometimes it will fail.
Have a successful run first. Once you've had the successful run, because that conversation is in the AI's context, is in the agent's context, you're just going to turn it. We had a successful run. Turn this into a skill.
These are the best skills.
The best. The ones that you generate after a successful run. I'll stop here because I think you're about to say something. Yeah. Yeah. I am. I love how passionate you are about this. It's it's it's good, and and it's so useful. And it's interesting the the point in time that we're speaking at because, like, I'm learning a lot of this stuff right now. For people that are listening and might be unaware,
can you explain
what is a skill
in, like, layman layman's terms?
And then what
if I'm looking to be more productive,
make more money, save time, what is the value of using Skills?
Skills,
they're they're
noted as skill dot m d files.
What's interesting about Skill files is they will they will contain instructions
on how to do a specific task.
But here's what's interesting about it.
The specific task, like the full task,
the instructions of the task are not fully given to the model.
Right? I'll even go a step granular.
Every skill file contains the following three,
the name,
the description,
and the steps.
Right?
The name is the name of the skill.
The description is it describes what the skill allows you to do. The steps are whether it's code or a step by step instructions, that's what the agent follows to do set task.
What's given to the agent when a skill is created is just the name and description.
Why is this important? The reason why this is important is we don't wanna fill we don't wanna fill the mind of the agent with too much information.
Remember, if you give it too much information, it's gonna be overwhelmed the same way you're overwhelmed
and it's not going to perform well.
Skills
are a trick. Like, we don't wanna dump in every single instruction that we have and this is why skills are so important. It's minimal information
that's called progressively,
and when it's called, it gives all the steps. And all this is to make the agent more performant.
Hopefully, that that makes sense. Yeah. So it sounds like it's
minimal information
that is still guiding the agent. Imagine having, um, this book and I have this book has all the information here, but all I know and that's stored in my head is is the chapters.
And if someone tells me, oh, such and such chapter, I don't need to know it offhand. I'll just open a book, go to the chapter and read the specific thing. That's what the model does with skills. It stores the name and the description. It doesn't store the steps.
But when it knows it needs the steps, it then reads it in. This makes it minimal. And you can think of this almost like a a computer, you know, the less the more memory you have, the more space you have in your computer, the faster it is. Right? The more stuffed it is with files and the closer it is to its memory, you start to see it slugs and it's slow and it lags. That's basically what skills do for models.
It just gives it enough information it needs to know when it needs it. And when it needs it, it calls the entire thing. Yeah. No. That's really clear.
I love that. So
that's what was generated here.
Now let's go back to the prompt I typed in here, uh, this one right here. I said generate a sponsor report. Right? I tagged the skill. Right? And how you tag skills is you type an at and you just type the name of the skill. In this case, this skill was named generate sponsor report.
And I tagged and I gave it the YouTube video, and it says I'll generate a second report. I'm fetching the YouTube metadata.
It's asking me does it have access to call these tools? I'm going to say yes.
And what's going to happen is it's going to pull in the information.
Notice how it's asking for another request. I'm going to say yes.
And, again, if any of these lines don't make sense to you when you're using it, you copy this, you create a new chat, you paste, and you get answers.
And now it has the metrics. You can see here, I have the live metrics, 15,000 YouTube views, 279
tracked clicks.
I'm creating a JSON payload, rendering the page as a standalone HTML page. So it has the information.
It's now going to create this page.
And in just a little while, the HTML page is rendered. I'm checking the output.
Agents do take time. The smarter they are, the longer they will take. It says it's generated here. If I click, hopefully, this works.
And there you have it. I have a repeatable
process.
Now let's say I wanted this done daily.
What do I do?
I go in my chat. I open up WhisperFlow.
Thank you for generating this report. Can you make sure that this happens
every single week? I want a report generated every single week for the latest video. I do upload week weekly so it makes sense. Uh, make that happen.
And I hit enter.
And now the model has a skill.
It has access to my YouTube channel.
What I've essentially created Calum right now is a weekly workflow where reports going to get generated.
And notice how it's it's so simple. It's literally conversation.
It did it right here. So it says set up a weekly latest sponsor report. It will run every Thursday, 9AM American Toronto time.
And if I click on this right here, I can see information.
The the
OpenAI calls them automations
to sound fancy.
Um, and look what it it generated. It tell me it tell me here, generate a sponsor facing performance report for the latest public YouTube upload on the connected RossMike channel. Use the generate sponsor report workflow. Remember, we generated it earlier. Fetch the latest video metadata and statistics.
Identify the sponsored dub short link from the video description. Fetch the dub link info and click counters.
Calculate track link CTR,
then render a standalone HTML
report plus a JSON data payload, name the files with the sponsor name and the video ID so each weekly run keeps its own output. Keep conversion
caveats factual.
Do not expose API keys, OAuth tokens, and account IDs or raw tool logs.
This is going to run the next one it says here, 05/21/2026
at 9AM, the status is active. This is going to happen every single week. Now how I built this, I didn't see someone on YouTube build this and copy them. I built this on based on what's useful to me. So connect your tools. You can use OpenAI's native plug in marketplace.
If the tool doesn't exist there, which most likely won't, you connect Composeo.
Composeo is as easy as going to the dashboard,
taking a screenshot of the instructions,
giving it to Codex, and saying connect.
It will do it. And then after that, ask yourself what tools do I use? Ask the chat. I want to connect to this tool. Every time you ask to connect to a specific tool, it will give you a link, you will authenticate,
it will bring you back and now the agent has access to it. Then you can enter discovery mode. I want you to do this, I want you to do that, I want you to do that. And when you realize a couple of the steps that you did, you want it to be done consistently,
what are you going to do? You're going to turn this. You're going to tell it itself, turn this to a skill.
Once it's a skill, it's become a workflow. And if you want it to happen on a consistent basis,
nothing fancy here. I literally said thank you for generating this report. Can you make sure that this happens every single week? And guess what? It set up an automation and it does this every single week now. So on May 21, next week, 9AM, I'm going to get a message from Kodak saying here is the latest report.
Yeah. You know you know what, Mike? It's so good, and and thank you for sharing that. And the reason I say it's so good is because of what you mentioned in the beginning, which is that it's simple.
It's not 50 different agents in these, complex workflows and demos.
It's very simple. And so when you and I spoke, I actually wrote down three steps,
which is basically step one,
you you're using a codex, you connect it to composeo.
Step two is pick a real task that you do every day or every week,
and you coach the model step by step. So you go through that workflow step by step with the model first so that you get,
like, a great output.
Then once you've got a great output from the agent,
you then tell the agent to turn that into a workable skill,
and then you put it on some sort of repeated cadence.
You know what, Mike? So I'm gonna ask a a selfish question here.
Because
back to my experience
of using Claude Cowork and, like, reflecting on it, because it was a frustrating
and, like, a demoralizing experience.
Because I spent hours setting it up, and then the output that I got
wasn't useful. And the funny thing is, it told me at first, it's like, yeah, it won't be great at first, but it'll get better over time and all this stuff.
And what happened in my experience,
because I didn't get a great output to begin,
I didn't really use it moving forward because I knew I wouldn't get a great output.
And so when we talk about the steps,
I think that step two
of
people understanding
kind of how to coach the AI agent
initially
to give them a great output,
that is the key step. Because once you get the great thing,
then it's so easy as you've just demonstrated to turn it into a skill.
But I'm curious for you,
can you talk about your experiences
of
getting a mediocre output
or like a suboptimal and average unusable output
from this process?
And then what are you doing to actually make it good so that further down the line you can then turn that process into a skill?
Yeah. So
I, uh, grew up in an African household,
uh, which means if my grades were an a plus, I got b. Right? And some might call this craziness,
but now I look back at it and this was just a great feedback loop. I do good, I don't get beat. I do bad, I do get beat. I
bring that example up because
you are going to have runs
where again, I'm gonna use this diagram so it's super, super clear. You're going to have runs where you are just going to be frustrated because what the agent gave you, what you you gave it a good prompt, what feels like a good prompt, and what it gave you was pretty mediocre.
What you are going to do is you are going to
continue to work on it recursively
as if it was an annoying family member that you're stuck with but are frustrated with. What do I mean by this? Most of the times,
the agent will probably mess up. Right? Um, the models are getting better so luckily it worked out on our end. But let's say it messed up. And in this case, there was a perfect example
of actually not even it messing up, but I think me taking too long. If I go back here,
I took too long and it expired.
And I know for a fact most people would see this and would just panic and would probably give up.
What I want you to do and this is depending on the task might be time consuming
is you recursively work with it. Meaning, you tell the output that it's giving you is wrong and it needs to itself.
So let's say tries to connect to something and it feels connecting. You're going to tell it you failed at connecting at it, please fix this. You'd be surprised by the third or fourth time it figures it out because each time we'll probably try a different strategy doing so.
When it comes to creative work, this is probably the most painful because in creative work, um, the sauce is not trained into the model. Right? Your specialty,
your flow, your cadence,
and I know there are a lot of people that are like, oh, I'm fine tuning a model so it sounds like me. Um, humans are very unique in where a lot of the things we do are very subtle and are very hard to replicate,
uh, by a machine.
So
when it comes to stuff like that,
the feedback loop that you're going to give it is the same loop that like my parents did. You do good,
we create a skill. You do bad, we continue to work with you until you create a skill. It's literally just back and forth and and this is why I'm saying like the models have gone really good. The models are so intelligent now where if you tell it this was the wrong way and then you show it the right way or you go back and forth and it does it the right way and you create a skill, guess what happens? In the skill, it will write, I tried these different ways and this was wrong. The person didn't like it or it didn't work. Never use this method again. Right? So step two to your point and you put it perfectly
is the most important and it's probably the time you spend the most. Now, if it feels frustrating,
I want you to think of this as a human that's being trained on the job and you would have a little bit of compassion with a human. Hope at least you would be nice to someone who just started working for you. In the same way, I'm not saying be nice to the model but understand there might be a little training that's required.
Once you have that back and forth and the back and forth is simple, it's just prompting. It's just communicating with it. Something breaks, you tell it it broke. Now let's say compose you. Let me give you an example of how I would fix an issue. Let's say Composio went down and now Composio is just no longer a company. I would go on the agent and it'd be like, I want you to search the web and find a greater Composio alternative and
instruct me on how to set it up. I would go then set it up and if it breaks, again, I would continue to prompt back and forth and that's one thing I want to encourage people. If something isn't working, prompt the AI. If that isn't working, prompt AI.
If Codex isn't working, prompt Claude.
Prompting is where you fix a lot of the issues you might get in a workflow that's not working correctly.
For some of you, it might be one shot, which praise God that works. But for some, it might take a couple of tries.
Hang in there.
Continue to work with it. Once it has a successful run, you're going to have the best skill of life.
Yeah.
No. Mike, the the analogy of, like, the the African or, like, the immigrant parent is, very vivid
to me.
But you know what? It's it's it's a it's a great one. And so I wanna kinda go behind the scenes of your process for a second. So you get, like, a bad output from your agent, and and you correct me if I'm wrong in this.
You're
hitting whatever that key is that activates.
So you're like studying the output first of all. Like, you're looking at what it's given you. You're then hitting that key that gets you to whisper flow and you're like dictating
out
what was wrong or what you want corrected
in the output,
you're doing this process
repeatedly
until you actually get to a good output.
And then the instant that you get to a good output, you're like, okay. Save that workflow
as a skill.
Is that correct? That's
that's exactly it. That's the that's the step by step summarized perfectly right there. Right? Because it has all the perfect inform it has all the right information in context.
I just want it to be turned to skill as soon as possible.
Yeah. You know what? One one final thing, Mike, because you've been so great. When you set it up on this reoccurring basis and you walk people through how they can do it so it actually you know, every week, it delivers this.
Where is that output
going to,
and do you control that? So for example, are these sponsor reports I don't know. Before you even send them out, is it going is it like an email that it's sending you? Is it, uh, uploading it onto, like, your computer, like, a local drive?
Um,
where is it going typically for you, and what have you found
works best when you're using an agent?
So when you use something like Codex, Codex can do all of the things you just mentioned. Right? So I can have it just pop up in the chat. Right? Like like, just message me in the chat when something's done. Because if Codex is important to my business, then probably have this thing open or I'm using it regularly. So it could do via chat. I can also tell it to email me. Right? Again, all it would take is and this is what's so cool. All it would take is for me to connect my email and tell it, oh, send it to me. Right? Alert me. Um, there are even tools that can allow you to connect it to a telegram or to all this stuff and how do you like, how would I go about setting this up? Check this out. Prompt it. I want you to send this information to my telegram or to this or to that and it will do it and that's the cool part about these apps. So I say that to say, if you want the information
delivered
to you via email, tell it. You want it in a specific folder in your file system, tell it. You want it uploaded on Google Drive? Tell it. It'll tell you to connect and you could do it. You want it sent to you via telegram?
Tell it. How you want things delivered
is completely and utterly in your fingertips. The power is in your hands. It's just as simple as prompting it. Yeah. And it's so good. What have you found is what's best for you?
I'm a I'm an iPhone guy and I really like Apple. I I I really like iMessage.
So I have,
like, my own
I I can show it here, but, like, this is, like, my own agent.
But I think if you're starting out, I would really focus on using the app and getting used to the app because the app has so much functionality. Like, another thing, and this is just a side quest that people can do is you can type at and I believe I can click like build. Yes. I can tag build iOS apps,
which is like a plugin they have, and I can say,
build me a to do list app that looks like, uh, the Apple native reminder.
And I also want you to add light mode, dark mode toggle.
Right? And then I can hit enter,
and I can let this work. I can work on another task. Right? I think there's value in getting used to the app, right, especially if you're new. Focus first on the app.
Get good at it. Use it. Tinker around. Click all the random things. Touch all the settings. Like, just, you know, use it profusely.
And then once you've got to a good stage, then you can worry about, okay. I can connect it to my iPhone to this to that. Because I find that a lot of people will do all the unproductive stuff that's cool
and then be like, oh, I just wasted so much time. Like, all of this was kind of, like, useless.
Right? But if we scale for productivity,
make the productive thing first,
then it just becomes something you're stuck with. Like, I can't stop using agents because they make me so productive. Right? So that's
how I would think about, like, where to use and how to use the things. I would stick to the app first. Yeah. I'm curious for you, reflecting on kind of what you've experienced and getting to the point that you are now,
what would you say to the person that's listening? If they had to take one thing from this conversation
and even really just from hearing your story and experience,
what would you hope
is the one thing that they would take from you?
Yeah. Like,
I I genuinely think all the information you have is available. Right?
It's there. It's on YouTube.
It's on Twitter. It's on it's it's it's all there.
Right? What is important is consuming information and then acting upon it. Right?
A lot of people,
um,
will consume and not do. And I've done this before. I've been like a tutorial junkie before where I'll watch a bunch of tutorials on how to do x y and z. And it and there is a dopamine rush in learning something new, uh, but that can also be a mistake because you want to actually do. Right? So I would consume information and do. I would consume information and do. And I found that especially in my own personal experience after a certain amount of time,
at some point, you become
better than what's average. Right? Like, I remember in August 2022, I decided to take, um, Harvard had this has this free course called the CS 50, which is like an introduction to computer science program. And it's like an eight week program.
And it was probably the most, like, humbling,
borderline humiliating
thing. And by the way, look, the app is being built itself while we talk.
That's so cool. Yeah. It it it was very humbling and and, like, I almost felt embarrassed because I I I just didn't feel I could keep up. Like, it was so hard. It was so difficult,
but I stuck stuck to to it it and and that that led led to me building my first few apps. I sucked at it. I stuck to it. That led me to starting a startup.
That startup did really, really well. I stuck to it. But then I had a feud with a business partner. I ended up leaving the company with no equity, no cash,
no money even though that business was doing like couple million dollars a year. I stuck to it. Right? And then I got my first corporate job. It was annoying, but I stuck to it. Right? So there's just like this consistent
nature of like sticking to
this idea of learning and improving, learning and doing, learning and improving, learning and doing. And it never happens right away, but you'll realize at some point whether it's a year, six months, two years, at some point you'll realize, oh, you're a lot more smarter than you used to be and you're a lot more valuable than you are. And like that's the big thing. Right? Like when a lot of people like, oh, these tools are scary. This is even if it feels like a technical tool, so what? Try it. You know what mean? So what? You you don't know how to cope. So what? Give it a try. Use AI. Ask. Fail. Try it and if it sucks, it sucks. Right? But at least try.
Another thing I'll say is and, like,
like, a lot of one thing that grounds me is, like, I my faith grounds me.
You know, I I have motivation. I have a family I need to take care of. Right? So aligning all these things together
makes it so that, like, yeah, there's some things that I don't understand.
So what? There are lot of people who don't understand. Let's go learn it. Let's invest time. Whether it's buying a book, whether it's watching some videos, whether it's trying it out, whatever it is, whether it's paying for somebody's time,
the information's out there. It's just a matter of who's going to do the work, and unfortunately,
most people won't do the work. Mike, man, thank you so much for coming on and being so open and not gatekeeping.
I really enjoyed this conversation.
I I and I appreciate you having me and, you know, for sharing.
Just to show everybody, I know we're closing up, but, like, yeah, the the the app's done and, like, that was one prompt. So, like, you have access to this. There should be no reason why you don't try. At least try.
But, yeah, Calum, I really appreciate the opportunity and the time, and, yeah, thank you for for allowing me to be here. Yeah. It's pretty crazy that, like, as as we're talking,
the the AI,
like, the the agent is just building the app and it's, like, popping off on the screen. Uh, that's cool. Yep. That's cool.
Thank you, mate. That was great.
Appreciate you, Callum. Thank you. So So if you enjoyed this conversation and you wanna hear even more stories like this, then just click here. And also my team is gonna put some more videos that you can watch here. Thank you.