Why having a human partner still beats relying on AI alone

Welcome to No Compromises. A peek into the mind of two old web devs who have seen some things. This is Joel.

And this is Aaron.

One of the things that bothers me about some podcasts, or just YouTube videos in general, creator stuff,

is when they set up a whole episode just to shill one of their products. Like, you can kind of tell right away in the beginning, like, "Oh, man."

I want to be upfront and say, "At the end, this may turn into a shill for one of our products."

Okay.

But it didn't start out that way. But as I thought through what I wanted to talk about today, it sort of led to one of the things we're already doing.

So, I just want to get that out front right away.

That's awful convenient, Aaron.

Yeah, I'm not a sell-out shill. I'm not trying to just push stuff. I mean, that's what the four seconds at the end of this podcast is about.

That's right.

If you listen to the end, ever. So, one of the things I kind of want to talk about today is, I had a really strange scenario last night.

We had a thunderstorm, and it knocked out a lot of power, it did some weird stuff to electronics in my house.

I got to this point where I couldn't turn on my MacBook, and I couldn't figure out why. Long story short, I just noticed I have a CalDigit Dock,

and it's light on the front of it was not turning on. And I thought, "Oh, no, I've blown my dock out," or whatever, "and I can't connect all my stuff."

And so, I unhooked the laptop take it somewhere else. It works fine, thank goodness. And so, I go through this whole troubleshooting step. I then told Joel.

I called up Joel on Zoom, I'm like, "Hey, I might be a little slow on our work, or I might not be able to do our podcast because my Dock isn't working.

I needed to test the power supply, and I don't really know how to do that, Joel. Do you? I have my multimeter." And he kind of helps me and walks me through it.

Okay, cool. Power supply is good. I think I'm going to have to buy a new dock, but I'm not sure, so we'd have to call. And I do some more research,

I go over to AI, I'm googling stuff, I go through Reddit. And I have this timer in my head that there's like 15 more minutes left until

I have to decide whether I need to buy another Dock to get it here tomorrow from Amazon.

Oh, sure. Yeah.

Or, if I can fix this myself. And luckily, I came into this one little article. This guy had almost the same problem. He's writing a blog post,

and he said he was working with CalDigit Support, and they told him to do something. Like, two weeks later during the RMA process,

they came back and said, "Have you tried hooking it up to another laptop?" And why would that matter, right?

Well, you always have a backup laptop for stuff like this.

Right. I normally don't, I just happen to have one available to me right now. And so, I hooked it up there. The light didn't come on,

but it did start powering. Long story short, I'm going to cut out the boring part of this, is I ended up... my dock works. For some reason,

it was just this weird way of hooking things together that now fixed it. I don't understand why. I'm glad it's working. That's not the point of this.

The point is, I called Joel.

You did.

I was a little stuck, and I called up Joel. And what was interesting about that is, so often we think about when we're working with

partners and different programmers and people on our team, that they can only just help us with one particular area of, I guess I'll say, life.

I'm not saying that we should start asking for life help from each other. But we sort of get this idea in our head what they also know, right?

Yeah.

So, I kind of know where my limitations are. And in my head, I sort of assume that I know where your limitations are because I worked with you.

Yeah.

But I decided maybe not, maybe Joel does know a little bit more about electronics than I do, and turns out he does for many different reasons.

And so, he was able to help me with that too. So, a couple things I wanted to pull out of this. First, I am very lucky to have a business partner like Joel.

He didn't know I was going to say this on this podcast, so I'm seeing his face right now trying to figure out where I'm going and what I'm going to react.

Yeah.

But I'm very lucky.

[unclear].

I'm very lucky, because it's a person I can work with that sees stuff very similar to me, but differently. So, we have different standards,

different things. We can kind of go back and forth. And earlier today, we had a conversation, which I'm going to share a little bit about too.

Where I wanted something changed on a pull request Joel was submitting to me. And I could see Joel was like, "I don't want to do this."

He even crossed his arms, I could see him on Zoom. He doesn't know that he does that, but when-

That's a dad pose. That's comfort, it's not always a guarded position. But anyway, it was this morning, just so you know.

Yeah, okay. And so, I was asking for something that I pretty certain thought would be the right answer, and I was pushing pretty hard on it.

But I got to this point where I basically told Joel over and over, "I really want this. If you don't do it, that's fine, I will do it.

But I think I'm right, and I want you to try it."

Okay.

And so, he went through this process, and he did try it. He found some things, he sort of followed some of the stuff I said. I'm not always right,

but in this case, I really felt I was. You didn't want to do it, and you decided just kind of do it anyway, just to see.

Yeah.

Deep down, I kind of felt like maybe you were giving in a little bit for two reasons. One, just to shut me up, and two, to prove me wrong.

No.

Like, you could do a little bit of it, and be like, "Oh, yeah, it's not as easy as you think, Aaron." That was what my thought was,

but I was willing to push forward anyway.

Okay. No, I honestly like to connect this with the earlier story. Part of it was like you were having a morning already. I'm like, you know what?

I'm not going to argue, I'm just going to do this. Aaron's over there fighting with... he's getting his laptop to work. Like, "I'll give this 30 minutes."

Like in my head, I time-boxed it too. It's like, "All right. This isn't going to derail my whole day out. I'll try it."

Exactly, you're right. But the interesting thing about that is, because I've worked with Joel for so long, I was able to have a sloppy way of

communicating my needs and desires to him. Even emotional way. And he sort of said, "Well, I know that Aaron will help me with other things,

and he's going to pick up the slack when I have issues." And we even joked about calling ourselves babies and stuff.

Like, sometimes you see a thing and you're like, "I'm a baby, I don't want to do that." But when you do it, you're like, "That was fine."

And so, we've both ran into that, we do that back and forth. So, I just wanted to, like I said, bring it back to two things.

One, I'm very lucky to have someone like Joel to work with. And I really think if you're working by yourself, you should probably see if you

can find another partner to work with. Even if you're not sharing contracts, even if you're not sharing work, just someone to bounce these

things off of in real time and on video. There's something super important about seeing the person reacting. It's why all these

companies always talked about working in person. It's not so much just always control, a lot of times it was.

But it's also because there's that additional bit of feedback and conversation and things you see with people.

So that's the first thing. See if you can find a person to work with. Hopefully, they're as cool and good as Joel.

Right.

And I know I'm kind of conflating things here, though. But in a way, I talked to another guy, his blog entry, I didn't find that result on AI.

I found it from another human being. Now, maybe AI indexed that, and it was such a small amount of temperature and all the weights

and all that kind of stuff that it never would have thought it to bring it up until I asked specifically about it.

But I didn't know to ask specifically about it, but I was able to follow what other human beings were sharing with each other because

they want to make each other better. And that was really important. So, my second point is, one of the things I've been sort of struggling with is,

"Should I keep blogging? Should I keep trying to teach people?" Because AI just has everything now. But there is something to be said about that,

about sharing stuff, micro audiences, you know. Just because AI knows everything doesn't mean it knows what you specifically need to know at that time,

you know, these different things. So, I would say the second thing is, don't always just rely on AI. Remember, you do have humans and other partners you can talk to.

Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything, especially the part about me being amazing and super helpful. But, yeah, I'm kind of unwinding some of the

things you said in my head. And I just want to pick up on the video thing for a little bit. Because I will confess, you forced me into this.

Like, when we first started working together, like, "I can never turn my video on." Like, "Whatever, I'll talk to you... Like, I'll share screens with you,

but I don't have to have my video on. It's stupid." But, like-

By the way, it's a fight every single client, almost every single client I take on has this fight. And it's not personal,

but I'm telling you, I have seen this, and it makes a difference.

Yeah. And I am a true believer now, like I really do. So, I wanted to call that out because I'm sure we've talked about that before on here.

But it seems like it shouldn't matter, but it really does. So, anyways, that was one thing I took away. But, yeah, I like the knowledge-sharing thing too,

and the blog article. Because you know that guy probably ran into that weird thing, went through support. Like, "Why did that work?"

Like, "Why would plug it into another computer... like, this doesn't make any sense to me," but still documented it.

Yeah.

And then you found it, and you tried it, probably thinking the same thing. And it worked, and it's like I love things like that.

Yeah, there's no way that should have worked. And honestly, I don't even know if that's what fixed it. I just know that that was the

troubleshooting step that got me to the next troubleshooting step that made everything work.

Yeah. No, but just a little bit more on the sharing knowledge. Because I think about the same thing, too. I mean, like, for Mastering Laravel,

we have the daily email. I mean, we make this podcast, like, there are things that we put out into the world.

We have books.

Yeah, exactly books. All this. And it takes effort, it is enjoyable. Like, there's a satisfaction that comes from it.

But then, as I see... you know, I don't really watch our search traffic too closely. But as you see some of these things erode, at least industry-wide,

it's like, "Why am I doing it? Am I just feeding the AI, and then the AI is going to generalize it? And maybe give a worse version of my answer, anyway?"

But it's encouraging to hear stories like yours. I hope... You should post a comment or something. Did he have comments on his blog?

Can you give him a thumbs up, like, "Hey, this helped me."?

Ah, there was no comments on his blog. Yeah, but I was going to go back and be like, "Hey, that worked for me too.

I don't know why, and I don't believe it should. I don't like that this."

"This worked, but..."

Yeah. But yeah, I think you pointed that out. Like, the sharing information. But then, going back to the first part, there's is not only sharing information,

but it's like, where does that information come from?

Yeah.

And so, it's that information is delivered in two mechanisms. Product: content, created, written, or from a person's mouth or communication.

And so, that's kind of ties me to that first point. Which is like, "I'm I'm happy to have a person to talk with in real time."

So first of all, I'm bookmarking this episode because when I need a little boost of feeling good, I'm going to come back to it.

And, you know, maybe you should bookmark it too. Because it's also like you were right about the coding thing, and I did it, and it's better.

But no, just like in all seriousness, I firmly agree with you that having another person to bounce things off of is useful. It's useful when you agree,

like the sanity check. Like, "Am I right about this? Like, does this make sense?" And then if you say, "Yeah." Then it's like, "Okay. I'm going to move forward."

But then, even more so, those cases where there's pushback, I've felt this. Where it just... at first I'm annoyed.

Like, "Aaron, why don't you just agree with me?" But I think it leads to a more productive partnership and relationship.

And just like it ends up in a better result. Like, if we're talking about code, for example, it makes the product better.

So, yeah, I echo everything you said, and not just because you said nice things about me. But I feel the same way toward your side of it, too.

Like, there's a lot that I've picked up from you as well.

So, I sort of mentioned electronics a little bit. I'm trying to learn electronics a little bit more. So I was setting up a little workbench for myself.

I have various different tools, and I needed scissors. I don't know what for. So I went to my office, and I have two scissors.

I grabbed one, and I brought it over there, and I did some cutting and whatnot. And then I started thinking, like, "I like this electronics setup.

I want to keep my stuff separate. So I'm going to have my electronics, and I have my office." Separate locations, all that kind of stuff.

And I looked at the scissors, and I said to myself... I said to myself something about the scissors.

Okay.

You ready?

I am.

I said, "Oh, I should get the other one. This is my nice scissors." Does that make me weird, or old, or what? Who has a like nice scissor?

Like, granted, I have two pairs of scissors, one was more expensive and cuts nicer, but who cares. Why do I suddenly have a nice scissors?

It's like, was your reaction like, "Oh, this is too nice to use in this context? I should save it for cutting like expensive wrapping paper or something."?

Well, yeah. "I should save it for my office, which is my nicer location... This is just electronics." And you know, you dull them on wires or something.

And I'm like, I know there's a wire cutter too, but I just have scissors.

Yes.

And so, I don't know why, though. It's my nice scissors, and I went back to my office and swapped it out for the other scissors. What's wrong with me?

Remember that shilling I did in the beginning? Well, we have all those things on our site.

Yeah. So, head over to masteringlaravel.io, check out our books, our community, get unstuck call. All of it's there waiting for you.