Outro.fm: Laravel AI SDK, Cloud, and How It All Came Together w/ Ian Landsman

Okay. Hi everyone. We should be live. Yay. Hello. I always try to think of like the day of the week it is when I go live, too, cuz I'm going to be like, "Oh, happy Tuesday." But then every time my brain like blinks. I'm like, "I don't know what day it is." Well, you know what? You need outro. You organize the show and outro and then you have an intro that has the date in it, which I've been doing this for Token Town, the other podcast we do, and like doing that exact like hello, it's Monday, whatever. And uh yeah, so I have to like I I 100% have to put it in the actual intro text or else it would like I would totally mess it up every time. And then that just made me think of a little feature that I want to add, which is like a dynamically insert the date. There should be like a little placeholder so you can just cuz the intro, this way the intro could stay the same. Yeah. And I could reuse it off a template, but uh the date is live. I think it would also if you're doing it dynamic like that, um you could like use it because you know how there's like all the different days like international tease day and stuff, you could like have it look to see if anything's an international day. Yeah. Hi everyone. Happy International Donut Day or something like that. That would be fun. Yeah, I like that idea. You could have like country specific or just like around the world and just have it like embed in there. Oo, like this this idea of like a live Yeah, like a live embed like an AI embed or like some kind of data feed. Yeah, because especially interesting. Even if you only did it with holidays and then you're hitting all the national holidays, people would be like, "Wow, Ian's very informed. He knows all those holidays." Well, this is interest because we have this I just we could I'm sure we'll get into it, but I did redo a big chunk of some of the functionality recently and like so now there's like these blocks and so it would be I think pretty straightforward to have one of the blocks be like a live block and doing stuff like this like in you know researching something and coming up with a summary or yeah listing the days something like this just like even probably a I'm sure somebody has like a calendar of every holiday that you can just suck in and display. So, like some kind of API at least. Yeah, some kind of like I think actually we actually use a service that has it's like something ninja. We use it for like one one API and uh they have like 200 APIs and it's just like all random stuff like that. It's just like yeah date date and time stuff or like I think they have like tax codes and like tax rates and like just it's like a literally it's just a service of just random API weather like just random APIs and uh I love that they probably have something like I would I have to believe they have holidays. I'll have to check after the show. But I would think something like if they don't I would think someone does they probably do. So that could be fun. Hi, web design 2015. Welcome in. It feels like I'm saying like hi to like all of web development. Only from 2015 though. Yeah. Yeah. Other years throw them away. A decent year. Hi. Uh Luis, welcome in Brazil. I'm so bad with flags. That's Brazil. Yes. I'm I'm bad with flags, too. My son, my oldest kid is like a savant with flags and he can literally name every flag in the world. It's it's unbelievable. We have this card game that's all the flags of the world and every couple years we just go through it and like uh he just names everyone and we're just like something. Yeah. Like does every little island every flag in the whole world he knows. It's pretty Does he like practice? Not anymore. When he was younger, he was super into like atlases and just like, you know, just like flags directly, I think, and stuff. And so he just memorized them all and now he knows them all. Maps. He's super into maps. That's so impressive. I wish that were me. I'm like geographically challenged. I don't know my flags. I'm okay with geography in general, but flag like once you get outside the kind of core uh group, I don't Yeah, the big countries, I don't really know them. And then uh yeah and he yeah and so he can do the flags and where they are in the map. So that's the other part of the game is like this is where it is. So yeah so impressive. Let's see. Hi Krishna. Hi Kik. Yes. Happy birthday Laravel. I think was it June 8th was the 15th birthday for Laraveville. Oh was it? I think it was I think so. I know it was this month. I believe it was June 8th because I saw something on Twitter. Hi Josh. He said the Godfather himself. Dale said sad that Ian will never Laravel new again. Don't tempt him honestly. Yeah, exactly. Well, on the show this week, I was kind of talking about that, but I kind of left myself a that I will Laravel new an existing product again, but I don't know if I I want to have more new products that are just brand new. So, we'll we'll see. I'm sure I will at some point. I think I was being I don't know. I think I I think it would it's unlikely I'll never Laravel new a new product again, but uh you know, you never know. That's fair. I want to make side projects and Laravel knew for that. But if I was making something that's like going to be a product, I think I'd be like, "No, cannot touch. Cannot restart." Yeah. No, the restarting's fun. I like the restarting. It's like you have all this knowledge. Yeah, we have all the knowledge and you're going to restart and utilize that knowledge you have now. So, I have the t-shirt, the Laravel new t-shirt. You are one of the few the 10 people in the world who have the Laravel new t-shirt. That is correct. I just thought about that now. I was like, I should have worn it on stream by that time. Oh yeah, I didn't even think of it either. I should have worn mine. That would have been funny. And then Josh had a question about outro, but I think that's the perfect time to actually start our introduction and jump into this. Um, so hi everyone. We're here today to talk about Outro FM. If you don't know what that is, then you're at the perfect place where we'll explain what Outro is. Um, but it is something that Ian built for podcasters and we'll be talking about kind of behind the build. So, what he used to build that and going more into the technical details of that. Um, so let's start with a quick intro. Hi, my name is Leah Thompson. I am a deval engineer at Laravel and I work closely with our online communities as well as do do a lot of live streams here on our channel like this. And I'm here today with Ian Lansman. Ian, do you want to do a quick intro and tell people your background? Sure. Started Hello everybody. Um Ian Lanceman here. Yeah, started a company called UsersCape 20 years ago or so. Um we have a our main products called Helpspot which is a customer service application help desk software and then uh you know have various side projects uh over the years. is I run laraj jobs.com for the job board for Laravel and um you know have ran the first two Laracon uses ran laron online with Eric Barnes. So yeah, kind of been around and uh we're going to talk about my new side project which is outro.fm which is uh yeah podcast management platform. Yeah, I think that so like my next one was briefly explain what outro is. I think you did a great job there. And kind of why are we talking about Outro? Like why do you think? Uh well I mean in terms of what it like its purpose um you know I've run podcasts for you know my current podcast with Aeron's approaching three years old and uh before that I had a podcast that went on for like five or six years and so I've always had this issue with like organizing the podcast. Uh so like we use Trello generally which is fine but not like doesn't know it's a podcast right? It's just a generic board. So you kind of run up against it not being able to automate a lot for you because it doesn't know you're running a podcast. And then it doesn't do any of the other stuff that I want to do. So things like you have people email you for like a mailbag or feedback. And if you have a co-host that becomes its own weird situation because did you read this email or I read this email? Who read the email? So you're trying to share login and all that stuff. um things like selling sponsorships is, you know, again, if you're if you're me and you're technical, it's not like the end of the world to throw up a Stripe page, but for the average podcaster who's generally not going to be that technical, it's like a whole other barrier going to use some other service to sell your ads and all that stuff. Um guest management, if you do an interview show, all those kind of things. So, yeah. So, what Outro does is it does all that stuff. It's like all the management of running a podcast and organizing it, having hosts, co-hosts, guest hosts, guests, uh, all that is going to be in this one one platform. And it's not going to host your podcast. It's not going to record your podcast. So, this is the part that makes it a little bit out there is there's a lot of tools for hosting your podcast. There's a lot of tools for recording your podcast. There's currently literally no tools for organizing and managing and like producing your podcast. So, this is where you're going to be able to do that. We will see if people want to do that, but uh I want to do it. So, it'll be at the very least for me, which will be good. Yeah. I mean, just you explaining all the features, I can see like how useful it would be, especially if you do have a co-host like you said, cuz I never even thought of that. And even with like me planning out the streams, right? I have like linear tickets for the streams and then I'm like doing my Yeah. And it's it doesn't sync with anything and then I have to like keep up with like the separate like emails and everything. This is why we're going to get you on outro when it's out. We're going to get you on outro because I think for this type this is very you know this is a basically a podcast right? Like I know you think about it more like a stream but it's like you have a guest on and you're doing an interview, you have questions. So in your case, right, you use Google Docs, which is also a thing a lot of podcasters do. Um, which again is fine. Uh, but like reusing things is difficult. Like if you had multiple people in there, sometimes that's weird. Um, so yeah. So it's just a, you know, even things like templates for how you do different types of shows and streams you do where you want to have different formats for them. So Outro does all that stuff. So, yeah, it would be cool to get you in there to kick the tires, maybe get you out of linear, which is one I haven't heard of from the other podcasters I've talked to. Not a lot of linear users in the podcast world, but um yeah, that's And you're doing guests, right? You have lots of guests on here, scheduling the guests, um all the stuff that goes into that that people, if you don't have a podcast or a stream, you might not realize. Things like emailing them the day before to make sure they have access to things. emailing them the the segments, which is like what you did for me, right? Here's the Google doc. Here's the segments of like so you have some idea what we're going to talk about. So, outro will be able to do all that. Have it all automated so you don't have to like remember to email the person and all those things. Um, let them schedule a time to appear and like manage the scheduling of it. So, yeah, all all that stuff is going to be possible eventually. We're not we're not all the way there yet, but that's the goal. I love that though. And I know there's also um which I'm sure we'll talk about more especially with like the technical breakdown, but there's also the AI assistant for it, right? Yep. Yeah. So we have the gopher which is like uh you know like on a movie studio you might have a gopher who runs and get stuff. So you have the virtual gopher who's the AI. Um yeah, we'll get into that more but of course it uses Laravel AI SDK and it works great. like it's it's surprisingly useful even to me u because even as the guy building it like the other like yesterday. So, we're gonna have a thing eventually where like the sponsorships once we can sell the sponsorships for my show in Outro, it will just put them into the correct upcoming episodes. But that part doesn't exist yet. And we were about to go on air and I totally forgot to like move the ads uh you know to like put the ads in outros segment list so that we know what ad reads to do and who's going to do them um which is all managed and outro. So, I just told the gopher, I was like, "Hey, gopher, copy this show's the last show's ads over to the new show because for us it goes by month and so they're actually the same ads." So, the gopher just went off, copied it over. Um, did find a thing I want to tweak to make that better and actually did that. Um, I don't know if it's pushed up yet, but uh, yeah. So, AI stuff like that's really cool. Even stuff like it does a lot of things that I think are cool to automate. Like I we we work off a lot of links on the show. So, it's like there might be a product announcement or there might be something like that that we just post put a link into Outro for and it like auto summarizes it and gives you like bullet points so you can just like quickly reference it. If I'm not the one who added it, like if the co-host adds it, then I maybe I don't even have time to read the article or I didn't read the article, but now I can see the quick summary right there and I don't have to like go to the article. Um, and you can do other stuff like I've had it I've given the gopher a link and said go read this and turn it into segments for the show. And so then it'll go read it and say okay like I'll make this into three segments covering different topics or whatever. So yeah, there's a bunch of AI all over it. There's going to be AI for like um and this is built but has to be refined things like translating or uh transcribing the episode and then doing like your show notes and doing your social media, writing the social media posts and things. So yeah, AI all over it. AI is everywhere in there. Oh, that's nice. Cuz again, I'm like having to separately go to AI to like workshop different things like the outline or like and then I feel like a lot of times I do the back and forth of like I don't like how this sounds, fix it, fix it. Whereas like if you already have something that is like streamlined for that for making the outlines and the social media post, I feel like you're more likely to get something you would use right away cuz again you're using the Laravel AI SDK, so I'm sure you have like agents and different stuff like set up to tell it how to respond. Yeah, exactly. And like there's it knows like again like it's like this thing where it understands what exactly what you're trying to do. It's like, okay, so and you can set it all up. What social media sites do I post to? And then, uh, you can customize the prompts for those. So, like if you I always want my Twitter post to use emoji or I want it to never use emoji or whatever I want, right? Like I can just put that in the custom prompt. And so now when it makes these uh, you know, the tweets for you, it'll it'll have that all built to your spec. Of course, there is a little box there. So you could say refine it right there if you want to refine it with AI. But I do think it'll save a lot of time to have that like okay like we just fed it in the raw episode and out pops show notes and social media link you know post for every social media site we use. Um and that's kind of like the V1 as far as we're going to go. But I can imagine in like a V2 where maybe those get auto could auto post for you, right? like it could schedule the links to Twitter and everywhere else and you could post to it like you might with a buffer or something like that. So that's you know gets into a lot more complications. So not going to do that phase one here but uh but even just doing the writing because like you said like everybody's just going off and doing it with claude separately and if we could just do that all one spot I think it's cool then gives go for access to searching the transcripts and doing other stuff with them in the future. So yeah, it's like also you'd have everything in one place whereas sometimes I'll go off and ask um Claude something but it'll be like in one chat and then I'll go do something else and then I forgot where it is. So then maybe I make a new chat and ask again and Yep. Exactly. Like cycle when you use the gopher um like whatever screen you're on, the gopher gets the context of that screen and you can break him out of that if you need to but most of the time you don't need to. So it's like I'm on this show, this show's page, right? And so it knows the show I'm on and the episodes for the show and like so you can just ask it stuff and it'll has all the correct context and can just be much smarter because you don't have to like tell it everything so specifically. You could say like move this, you know, move the upcoming episode to next week and it'll just do it even if you have multiple shows or things like that because it knows the show you're looking at right now. So yeah, I love that. Also, Josh asked earlier, what I want to know is now that outra is actually shipped, what is there even left to Laravel new? So, there's always more to Laravel new. Um, I actually right now don't feel I don't have the urge to Laravel new outro. So, I feel like we're in a pretty good pretty good space with it. Um, I did rebuild a big chunk of like the segments and how they work over the weekend, but it wasn't quite all the way to a Laravel new. was uh just a big feature redo. So I wouldn't wouldn't say that was a Laravel new. But yeah, right now that's what I was talking about in the podcast this week. I feel like maybe I'm in a good spot with the Laravel new for now. But I'm sure there'll be I'm sure there'll be something that gets under my skin that makes me want to either redo this or something else that we have a lot of other products and systems too because we have like HubSpot and Outro, but we also have like HubSpot especially has a bunch of three or four other sort of back officey type systems that we use to run it and so those are always uh likely candidates for Laravel new as well. Okay. See, so you moved on from Laravel new for hopefully outro, but now you're already thinking of other things you can learn. Yeah, there's always more. Yeah. Then Raphael said, "Larl new outro, too." Yeah, me too. We We start fresh, clean slate. Um, probably not going to happen. See, this is the joy. It's so much easier when you have nobody using it. So, like, as soon as even one person's using it, it's just so much harder. So right now the one person is like me, Aaron and Dave are using it. Um so it's just my world but even that it's added a lot more complexity like I did this uh we did the segments over the weekend of how they store data about the notes of a segment and it's like man now I have to like do a migration and it's actually super different. So it wasn't even like that easy a migration. Now it's just our stuff so I was kind of like I don't super care if it's perfect. Um, but I at least wanted to get the basics there because we did have stuff in future episodes already that I didn't want to like totally lose. So, and me and the AI got it done, but it was just like a whole another step. So, I know this is counter to the popular sort of uh advice. But, I don't know. I like waiting to get let real customers in there until it's pretty pretty ready. Like, you're never totally ready, but I feel like you let people in too early. that just slows you down on making the changes you know you need to make because the thing's not even done. So I think that's fair especially if like like I think it's one thing to let users in if what you have is pretty solid. Um but if you're still changing things and could possibly change like big things like change it in a major way, I feel like that's something that you would necessarily want users already in for. Yeah. Like for me for outro like the line for me is kind of like the segment management stuff which is like prepping the show and your notes about the show and all those things which is getting really close like we're using it. It's getting better uh kind every week I'm working on it here lately. So once that's done I feel like okay like that's a core bit that I could probably start letting some more people in at least as like a beta that works once that's like stable. Yeah. maybe like selling sponsorships isn't ready yet or maybe the mailbag isn't ready yet, but those are like kind of separate features that can be added on in somewhat isolation. so yeah, when you get like the core idea working well, then I feel like that's when it's kind of safe to let some people in. I think that's fair. And then Florian's here. hey, what's up, Florian? I say because he was like, oh no, I missed the start. It was like right as we were starting to No, you could go back. Yeah, you can rewatch it, Florian. Yeah, give us those YouTube views. You got nothing going on. Come on. And then he instantly followed up with outro should be launched any minute now, I think. I think uh me and Aaron on the show, I think I did he did force me to give him a date. I feel like it was it's like July 9th or something like that. Um so we'll see. We July 9th for me to have somebody other than us in there. So, Mhm. I think it's possible. I got to find the right person who's also not won't be too mad if I blow away all their stuff, but uh you know, I think we'll get somebody in there by then. Um yeah, so I mean, I'm not too worried about blowing away their stuff in reality, but still, you know, it's very you're going to be the first person on a new product. You got to have a little bit of uh you got to be aware there could never know there could be an issue. So, and when you have Aaron here to keep you straight, he said July 8th. Oh, July 8th. You're stealing a day from correction. No, I want the ninth. The eth. That's one day sooner. Hold on. It's still basically a month, though. Yeah, I guess today's Oh, today's only the ninth. That's true. I'm going away for a week in the middle there, though. So, that's like So, it's really only like three weeks, but yeah. Okay. All right. The eth. You know, I should actually put this and put this on the calendar here. If you have it by July 8th, then you can just market it. All of Laracon July 28th. Just go around and market it. Ship outro to new person. Okay. All right. All right. I write that down before. Yeah. Just the whole day. Hey, I need that day. Yeah, exactly. We got the AI now. We can do a lot in a day. It's a lot faster than the old days, but I think I'll hit my I think I'll hit my deadline. I do hate deadlines. Erin's trying to keep me honest here. It's worked so far. I have to say, since he started putting dates on me, stuff has moved along a little bit. And I haven't Laravel nude since then. So, good job, sir. Good job. That's good. Less fun, though. But good. Yeah. I just want to keep going forever, right? This is proper coder mindset. Like, I'm not trying to ship. I'm just trying to noodle around in my code and, you know, build features and not ship. Said July 8th, but what year? Oh, that's a really good I could pull that out of my hat if I need to. 2027. We didn't specify. I feel like that was dangerous to tell you because you'll just be like, what about new Yeah, exactly. What if I have a great idea and I need to start again? You just add it on. You can V2, V3. No, we start fresh each time. New idea, new new code base. That's how you do it. When you start new, do you like start new on the kind of like new feature or new direction you want to go in and then just slowly add back in the base? Or do you kind of save a prompt that has the base and then you just add on the new feature? Like how? No. time I've see this is like to be fair to me it hasn't quite been like oh there's just like a new feature and I'm like about new it's like the whole product has been reconsidered okay and so what I've even built before is no longer applicable essentially and so yeah like in the beginning the very first iteration was kind of more like a Patreon kind of thing um that still had the same idea of like managing your segments and stuff but had a whole bunch of other marketing type features which I think we will get to and I already kind of want, but we're going to go on the other side, not lead with that. So, yeah. Other than that, nothing worked. And then I had it um where it was really like kind of only set up for one show. And so, but then I was I'm going to have multiple shows. And then I was like, oh, like I'm going to have to like do stupid stuff like have multiple tabs open. And even that sometimes gets weird with like the session stuff or like you're going to be moving between shows a lot and that's going to be super annoying to like multiple click move around and stuff. And so I was like, I really just want to see all my shows on one screen. And so then like nothing worked of how I had built stuff for that. So I was like, well, I got to kind of redo that so it all works right. Um, so I redid that and now we're here. We're locked in. I'm liking it. Uh, and also like I don't know how much you want to get into the business side of things, but also like just high level like it kind of went from like maybe something more for people who are just getting started in podcasting. Which the more I thought about is like not that good of business because like a lot of people start podcasts and then stop doing it after like three episodes, right? um to more of a like professional product for like someone like you who does it all the time or like a podcast network or a big podcast that has, you know, a lot of listeners and they're not like they're already established. They're already either are making money or it's like a corporate thing like this is where there is corporate money being spent on the show. And so, uh you know, charging $99 a month for it is feasible or something in that ballpark. Whereas like when you go for the new podcasters, like no new podcast is going to pay $99 a month. So now you're looking at like $5 a month. And if you're at $5 a month or $10 a month, you have to have a lot of customers and it's hard to get a lot of customers. So I prefer in general to be on the B2Bish feeling end of podcasting. And so that's that was also part of like the shift is like let's make like a professional tool um that people are willing to pay for because they already make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on their show or um they're corporate sponsored and 99 bucks, 150 bucks, 79 bucks, whatever it ends up being, you know, is not anything anybody's even going to blink at because if I save them three hours and the show is better, like that's printing money for them, right? Like super valuable. So yeah, that's kind of the So it's all a mixture of all those things led to the Laraveling over and over. No, I think that's fair because a lot of the tools you would use for like the podcast or streams are so much more like monthly and then they also have like the enterprise plans and all that. So I think that makes sense like that pricing. And I think also it makes sense not to target the newbies cuz like you said they do it like a couple times and then might like fall off and never do it again. So then maybe they would just like would unsubscribe or you're not getting the like bigger fish so to speak if you're just going after that like demographic, right? That's the main thing to me because I feel like I still want to serve maybe the new podcasters, but I'm thinking about it more from like a free plan or like maybe there is a very cheap plan just like filter out some of the like spammy type stuff, but it's like but it's kind of clear that's like the entry level. It's more like almost a free trial even if we like kind of let you using it. It's restricted and there's probably no AI features and like that stuff. And then but it's you know it's primarily a show for professional podcasters, streamers, YouTubers that that's like the core audience that the core market but uh maybe there's a free tier that's more really like just a marketing aspect right of like reaching a bunch of people and they're using it free and they're talking about it and that's that's great and some percentage of them will of course then become customers themselves which is great. So that's kind of how I'm thinking about that. It's like still serving that audience but it's not it's not like for them. It's uh not at least primarily. I think that makes a lot of sense. Um and then also just when you were talking about the like targeting them and it being like $5 a month or $10 a month makes sense with how you were saying you were thinking a like a Patreon kind of style first. That definitely lines up with that. Yep. Exactly. So that's where that was in the beginning. But it's like you do the math on that. It's like just hard to get that many customers. like instead of, you know, I I say this on the show that like my goal is kind of to have like 50,000 a month in revenue is like the goal long term. Like not not in a rush to get there, but like that's kind of to me that would be like a really good success with the product. And it's like well like you could do that with like 500 customers or you could do it with 5,000 customers and 500 customers is a lot easier to get than 5,000 customers. And so yeah, so it's all like a math game. I mean, this I'm just more of a naturally B2B kind of person anyway, but uh yeah, so that's that's what all played into that. And they can go back and listen to all the episodes of mostly technical where I go through it all in great detail if they want to go check that out. Now I kind of do because I've never been like someone who's like really into like the business side of things, but then now you're like it's all math and you're talking about the math of it. I'm like, "Oh, I like that. I love that." Yeah. Oh, yeah. There we go. Yeah, I have this segment I want to do on the show next week that talks about like raising prices. Little preview here for everybody. And that is also like the same thing. Like it's it's really just like a math problem of like if you raise prices like how many people will leave verse how much more revenue do you get? And you know it's kind of just math like are more people of revenue going to leave than what you raise? No. Then you should probably raise your prices. Um if not then don't do it. So yeah, there's a lot of math, you know, simple math in this stuff. Nothing uh we're not firing rockets to the moon here, but uh yeah, sadly. that's math is beyond my ability for sure. I love like I my favorite subject was calculus, so I love like calculus. Wow. Yeah, I majored in mathematics. Oh, well, there you go. There you're cheating here. See? Uh yeah. No, I I mean I'm sure I did calculus, but I don't I don't know anything about calculus. I don't know anything about I only know addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It's all I know. That's really all you need to know. That's what I say. And I was an accounting major, but that's and even there people like think you're mathy if you're an accounting major, but like there's literally nothing but like addition and subtraction. Like there's nothing else in accounting pretty much. So yeah, and programming, people who don't know like the type of programming I do tend to think that's of course mathy and but not at all. Yeah, it's mainly arithmetic. Yeah, it's just web web stuff. There's no math at all. Now we have the AI for even that. So it's nothing. You can find a way to put math in it. Sure. But but not inherently no mathematical at least at the web developer level. And yeah, if you're firing missiles that I'm sure there's tons of math in in those programming jobs, which I think like started talking about programming. So I think this is a great segue into talking about like the technical aspects to creating outro too. Um, kind of like getting it back on the rose from math. I could talk math the whole stream, but I love I love distracting us off the main path here. I'm really good at that, too. I try to be not distracted here, but if it's like on my own channel, I'm so distracted. But what stack did you use to build Outro? Yeah. So, I mean, it's Laravel, of course, through and through and all the Laravel goodies. Um, and that's the main thing, Laravel and the Livewire. So, it's Livewire front end. and I mean, it's pretty plain vanilla. I mean nowadays it's hard to be like totally plain vanilla but it's Laravel Livewire Laravel AI SDK which came out like during the initial development kind of of all this which was awesome. Um was forever wanting like the Hotweld AI library and we got it and it's so good. uh yeah so that's like revolutionary. That's I I think you guys like actually underplay the Laravel AI SDK even though I know it's like it's on the website everywhere and everything, but it's like it's so good. Um, and the AI is really good using it. So like I haven't looked at any of that code at all. I I you're like you probably have agents and stuff. Like honestly I'm not even sure what it's doing because like the AI just went off and built it all and it just like it just worked. Like that was some of the least me fiddling with the code and telling the AI what to do of anything in all of Outro was like kind of the gopher stuff specifically with it making the AI calls and things of that nature like the Laravel AI SDK just worked and that's even without obviously like it's not in the training of the models yet or anything. So, um, just using, you know, boost. Um, I assume it was using boost. Every once in a while, I see it loading up Boost, so I assume it's using it as needed. And, uh, yeah, so that was that's been great. But besides that, yeah, nothing fancy. the new um the new stuff I just did this weekend uh to redo the segments uh and kind of the notes around the segments does use React a little bit and some uh web uh I keep wanting to call them web hooks but web sockets um stuff for that. So there's a little bit of that. That's just like a sprinkled in like little one component thing for some interactive parts. And yeah, but nothing too crazy in terms of like the actual software part and then the hosting part is uh Laral Cloud and um all all the goodies for the most part uh Reddus and uh managed cues now which I do want to talk about managed cues but uh that's still great. I love the manage cues. Huge addition. Very happy with managed cues. Um, and yeah, you know, the storage and all the things I'm using planet scale for the database. So that's the only like non Laravel piece to that. And yeah, I think that's it. But it's pretty plain like that's what I, you know, I know it's going to be right now it's like just me working on it. But even once I have the team working on it, assuming we get some revenue and that makes sense to do, uh, like it's not going to be our primary thing for a while. It have to be quite big to like overtake HubSpot. So like, so I just wanted it to be like just give me all the Laravel goodies. Just let me use all the like straightforward Laravel app. I'm not messing with the folders. I'm not doing anything tricky. We're just using models. We're just using all the regular stuff. just that comes out of the box. That's what we're using. And just keeping it really simple and easy to jump in and out of if you're a Laravel developer without having to like figure out what the heck's going on and all that. And then also for the AI, simple for the AI to know what's going on because it's just a plain vanilla Laravel app that uh does normal Laravel type things. Yeah. No, I think that makes a lot of sense. Especially like I mean because I think it's easy like when it's just you to make something like very fine-tuned to what you want and what makes sense to you and not think about in the long term like what's easy for people to jump in and out of. And then especially like even using like booster AI you can like make your own rules and stuff. So you could like make it crazy and just like fine-tune it to make it easier, but then people would jump in and be like, "What is going on?" And then it makes it harder to onboard and like understand. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we have that with Helpspot with like that's just a you know, the original code for that. Now it's been transitioned sort of mostly onto Laravel. It's not I wouldn't it's definitely not like a traditional Laravel app, but the underpinnings are Laravel. Um, but you know before that it was just like my own invented framework basically which I'm not a good framework inventor necessarily. So I mean it was it was standard PHP stuff and it was like not necessarily hard to follow but it's just not somebody new coming in would take a long time to figure out all the stuff for sure. And like uh so you know it's just nice if like when someone comes in to work on it that you know there's like 80% of the app that they just know how it works already. And yes, like obviously the specific business logic and all that stuff is going to be custom, but yeah, just so much more straightforward there. Josh, also as soon as you were mentioning the stack, it's like a livewire mention. Yeah, I love the Livewire. He's a LiveWire guy that Josh. Oh yeah. And he said, "What I'm hearing is we need more AISDK content." I think so. And like even just like I feel like I I haven't I'm not totally following all every bit of content you guys are producing now since there's a lot of you and you're all doing stuff. I don't know there's this is to me is like a big angle on getting in people from other ecosystems because the other ecosystems don't have stuff like this. It's like just not this clean and awesome. And I feel like that's like a strong angle to be like yeah obviously you're using AI for whatever you're built. Whatever app you're starting today has some AI component to it. whether it's a behind the scenes thing or it's a chat front end or whatever it is and uh yeah so like making that AI story so simple and powerful and reliable uh I feel like that's appealing to people who are like where do I start with this and my framework I'm using doesn't even talk about AI right or things like that and so yeah I think that's that's an interesting angle so for sure more AI content Josh I think So too, I know like we've been focusing on a lot of AI too. Like even in I mean with so many people using AI now and like aentic coding being so big, I feel like in every stream we kind of at least briefly touch on it and I know like Josh and Kristoff have been doing a lot there. But there's so many different angles with it too where it's like the people who are maybe non-traditional developers and then for the traditional developers and for our own community and for the outside community and there's like so many different a lot to cover. Yeah. And is it what's vibe coded like is it am I vibe coding as a professional software developer even though I am like just like the AI do everything for this or is that not or you know it's like the different levels of that. Yeah. And I think there's also a huge part of this to me is like just producing a ton of content, which is can be annoying to have like content for content's sake, but the more blog posts, the more videos there are, like the better trained the models are going to be on all the different ways to use this. And then when people go to use the Laravel AI SDK, when the model's just oneshotting stuff for when you're trying to build something, that's a huge advantage, too. Uh, as well as just like when people ask it, what should I use, right? when it knows a lot about Laravel AI and it can recommend it like that's huge too. So like there's all these like kind of marketing aspects to it of just and the like training of the AI foundation models that you you don't have like a lot of control over. So you don't it's one of those annoying things where like you don't really know if what you're doing is the best thing. But but I do think producing a lot of content is the right thing to do and uh just give yourself the best shot at getting indexed as much as possible, getting every variation of different angle like we're building the chatbot, right? We're doing a behind the scenes Q production AI thing like whatever all the different flavors of how you might use the Laravel AI SDK. I think just having like a broad foundation of like example articles and stuff like that is actually super important. Um, yeah. No, definitely. Especially for like SEO and AEO too, right? Now you have AEO to worry about. Yeah. I mean, that's super important for this stuff. Yep. Absolutely. Or like all those people who are just learning to program who like they're going to be relying on the AI in the future, right? To be like, how how do I do what tool do I use? I have a product idea I want to do. Like like what chat GBT tells them to use is what they're going to start with. And so you want that to be Laravel as often as possible, right? Okay. Write all this down, Josh. We'll go we'll go over it after. So I know you said for the Laravel AI SDK that basically like Claude or um AI generated most of that code and that was so good at it. But do you so for the laral a SDK you're using it for gopher? Are you using it for anything else in Outroof FM? Oh yeah, tons of stuff. So like one of the things to me with like the AI um and how to use it in a product. This is part of why I wanted to build outro too. It's like just for my own learning of both like for developing with AI as well as for how do you integrate AI into a product and trying to feel that out and you know I think a lot of products like have chat widgets that don't need chat widgets. Now, this does have a chat. The gopher is a chat widget and so you can talk to him. I feel like it makes sense for this product. Maybe it makes sense for all products. I don't know. But I think there's also just a lot of places where like the sprinkling of the AI is really interesting and I find that more fascinating and more of like the software development process and where your thinking has to go than just like yes, the chatbot. We get the chatbot, you ask it questions, it knows about whatever that your app does and it can answer questions. Great. Like that's a very straightforward thing, but it's like the thing I was saying where like when you post just a if you just put a link into the segment notes that it automatically enriches it with a summary. Like I think that's just like a cool little thing that like AI lets you do where you don't even have to ask them. Like we don't even ask like we just go spend the tokens and every link gets an AI summary and you can use a custom prompt for it if you want. You could turn it off if you want and all those things. But, uh, it just does it. And so, but yeah, behind the scenes there's like like the transcription, the like we talked about already like kind of the show notes, social media stuff, um, is all AI. And then I want to use AI. This isn't built yet, but for things like not really for my size show, but for larger shows where you get a lot of email in your mailbag, um, a lot of times if when you like listen to the podcast, you'll just hear them talk about like we got a lot of emails for this and so then they pick one as like the representative one. So I think it would be cool to use the AI to like have a grouping structure. So like here's all the emails about X and here's all the emails about Y. Um, so you're not just again like just in Gmail reading through a million emails and kind of like ballparking it. It's like no, I can like literally have them grouped and all that kind of stuff. So I think that'll be cool or group them and summarize them. So like right here's the general feedback from all the email was XYZ and here are like three representative emails um that you might want to actually read. Uh, so I think that'd be like a lot of cool opportunities to do little enhancements like that um with the AI that's just like features that just happen where it's not like I'm telling you it's AI necessarily or I'm not like chatting with it necessarily. It's just like a thing that magically happens. Isn't that cool? And uh yeah, so I think there's going to be a bunch of opportunities like that all throughout. Mhm. And I know you're really excited whenever the Larville AI SDK was like mentioned. Did you start building out some of this stuff before it came out or you were trying to like wait until was already out? Yeah, kind it did. I did start because I did start this last June, the V1 of Outro or July or something like that. I don't know. Sometime last summer. Um, so I was building it before that with like the various libraries and things and some of it was like direct calls. Um, and then I was like harassing Taylor a little bit here and there like we need the Oweld version of the AI and then he like went off into the lab and I was so happy and they came out with it and I was like oh it's like even better than I expected like the agent classes I mean the tool usage I mean tool usage is huge and it's so easy obviously all the AI is being optimized for that now uh for tool usage in general and so I think Laravel AI SDK just having that so easy to implement Um, it just makes it incredibly powerful. Like this is all part of like the oneshotting of like building the original Gopher was just like he just had all these tools and it's like, "Oh yeah, I can copy a segment for you. Oh yeah, I can like build a new segment. I can add an episode and it's like he just has all this power and you kind of didn't even do anything like it's just like okay just building, you know, just built out basic tools for creating an episode, creating a segment, whatever. And now the gopher can just do all kinds of stuff. Now the gopher can take a URL and read it and make a bunch of segments from it and it just like all works. Um so yeah, I think the tool use is really awesome and that's probably one of my favorite little bits. And then definitely the agents the agent um aspects are something we're going to use a lot in HubSpot actually for the big we're doing like a big AI thing in HubSpot for like agentic answering and drafting and things of that nature. And uh we're gonna have like different agents that have different capabilities and so some of that's going to use the underpinnings of the Laravel AI SDK as well. So yeah, I think it's it's so good. No, I love that. I I think my favorite part is like the custom agents, but I also like how you said how easy it was to just like generate the code to where you don't know like the specifics of the agents for outro FM really because it just like did that for you which whenever I was creating like a little demo app it did the same thing and I had to like go through to specifically see what was going on cuz it just all worked perfectly. I was like this is exactly what I wanted. Yeah. And I think it's cool to like have projects where you can do that. It's like like with HubSpot we don't there's literally no code that nobody looks at like somebody looks at all the code e I mean it's a lot of it's AI generated now but like we have you know everything has to go through a PR and gets human reviewed and like all that stuff but for outro it's like hey nobody even uses this so who cares we're just we're just flinging the code and it's doing a pretty good job whenever I've spot checked it it's looked good it's already a better programmer than I am so it's fine and you know a few times I've had to redirect direct it on some architecture stuff, but it's not any different than I would have done with a human even potentially. So, um yeah, so that's been fine. And then, you know, if it gets big and it's making a bunch of money, we'll I'm sure end up at more of a like traditional review process. Um for now, yep, blinders on, as I like to say, blinders on. And I know you also uh mentioned Laravel cloud and how you're using it for hosting and you mentioned uh managed cues. So what what do you like about manage because managed cues came out what two weeks ago? Yeah, just yeah pretty recently just yeah a week or two ago. So yeah I just think cues are such a huge part of every app now and if you're not using cues enough you should use cues for lots of things. Um, and even like there's a lot of little things in Out that you know pretty much all the AI stuff except for direct chats go through the cues and um but still sometimes you want things to happen fast even though it's cued. So, you know, like the manage cues are nice because you can have different cues set up with different, you know, named cues and they can have different resource amounts and different timeouts and different things like that. So you can try to make sure it's as fast as possible. Um, so yeah, I just love it. I just want I just don't I need cues and I want to use them for everything, but I never want to have to deal with them and I just want them to always work. So that's like that's the part where I want the manage Q. Um, so yeah. And I think the old system was like okay, but it was a little weird because it was like on the app server and like I just feel like the visibility was like really hard to deal with because you couldn't like really see into what was going on with the queue. So yeah, the new manage cues are like obviously just they're good already and I think like the foundation's there for them to do even more which uh is going to be awesome. So I do I do have my only Laravel cloud feedback. I do have two managed cues. They're both on managed cues so I'll throw them out here while the the crew is listening. One this is the biggest one by far and I get what they're trying to do but right now the Q servers go to zero so they turn off. And I I don't want them to turn off. I want to always have at least one worker going no matter what. So that like even if nothing's going on, if I pop in there to do something, it just instantly works. So that would be my 1,000% 100 tier feature that I'm absolutely desperate for is just let that little slider go to one. I just want to not I want to get off zero. I want to go one. And then uh yeah, the other thing is just the you can see failed jobs, but you can't see jobs that worked. So I think it would be cool sometimes I just want to know if a job ran because it doesn't have like an offshoot that's like easily visible to me necessarily sometimes. So I think it would be cool to just have like the kind of companion to the failed logs which is like just the success logs. Um if I had those two things then to me like manage cues are absolutely perfect. But even just for here the v1 that's a week or two old like we just said like I think it's a huge improvement. So much better. Um, definitely the way everybody should run them and they're super cheap. I mean, I think if you have one running for a month, it's like three bucks or four bucks or something. So, yep. Great. So, like you kind of answered it then when you said it's like way easier than um how it was before, but do you feel like having managed cues now has kind of simplified the the process compared to what the Q clusters before? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think was because there was always like multiple ways like there was like the Q's on the app server and then you could have a a Q cluster. Um so yeah I think it's just I think it makes a lot more even forgetting even how it like actually works. I just think like the user interface for it is far superior to be like this is your default manage Q. this is your, you know, trans uh transcription queue, which is a separate thing with its own criteria. And yet, like you could do that before, but it was just like a little bit clunkier. So, I just think like the UI for this is better. And then, of course, like the ability to like just have stats and see failed jobs and like all that stuff is way superior. Um, and I know you could like run Horizon potentially too, but that was like kind of a special setup, which I didn't want. I knew I didn't want that because like this is like a special setup and that's I don't want to be in the special setup. So just let me pay. I know everybody's trying to go to zero with everything and like make it cheap to run, but I don't I don't care about cheap to run. I just want it to always work and be reliable and be up and be easy to manage and all that stuff. So yeah, Laral Cloud's great. Um this you know we've already and we've moved several other systems now to level clouds like outro is the first one on there and then like um two of the help spot like subsystems are on there and then the third like the biggest one is going there soon. So yeah loving the Laravel cloud. This is uh feel like feel like we're hitting our stride here with it. Let's go. I feel like we need a Laravel new shirt that has like the Laravel cloud logo. Yeah. Co-brand. Let's go. Larl cloud. Larl new on cloud because you can Larl new and then instantly deploy it on cloud. Yes. Yeah. All the all the deployment stuff is really great. Um the nightw watch integration is really great. This is like the first um outro is the first time I've really gotten to use nightw watch. So like you push the button and kind of all goes to nightw watch. And nightw watch has been really good. Definitely found some stuff through that and like the interface there is great. So, I love it when the whole ecosystem is working together, you know, and seamlessly. It's really cool. I like too um that it's really easy to set up reverb on cloud. It's really easy to do that. It's easy to do the inertia um SSR, all of it. It's just like a click of a button, which some of it is pretty easy to integrate with forge, too. But I just like the simplicity of cloud of hosting on cloud. Yeah. I we have a we have like well we had a bunch of servers on Forge which now for various reasons because like things were outdating on the Linux and stuff we um kind of consolidated them onto one or two servers but yeah I still love Forge for like a lot of stuff. I think forge is the right thing to do. And obviously if you want to like really customize the server, you still kind of have to do forge and things like that. But for your kind of regular SAS app, Laravel stuff, I feel like cloud is the logical uh default. Which like we talked about manage cues and like about using cloud in general, but what surprised you the most about Laravel cloud? Um, what surprised me the most? Uh, I mean, I guess I've kind of known about it a long time and like known what was going on, so I don't know if like I'm super surprised, but I And you know, a lot of people who are working on it, people like see all this. It's hard for me to like separate like what I didn't know and didn't know and stuff like that, but uh Yeah. No, I think it I mean I think like it's just cool that it actually like it's a it's a big thing to attempt, right? and to actually get it done and executed and working well I think is in and of itself like surprise isn't like the word I would use I don't think because like obviously I know everybody involved and like I don't think they couldn't do it but it's it's a big thing to do and have worked reliably and work in a lot of big use cases and stuff. So, I think how well it's gone is seems like great and I love like where it's going and uh yeah, I just think you can you could really see come through kind of Taylor's vision and uh just having a tool like so specific to to the to the framework is advantageous. Like obviously I'm sure there'll be support for other frameworks and tools and languages, you know, over time, but I think at its core like it knowing Laravel apps so well. Um like even stuff like here this is a great one that's I guess I would I would say I was again I don't know it doesn't have to be surprised maybe it should have been like a better word. Yeah like here's a cool thing there's like u when you have like the variables like your environmental variables but then it gives you the other box of like the ones it's injecting on its own right and it's I just think that's like a cool little thing. thing. It's like, well, I set up these systems, but I can still see how it like connects to Laravel. Like, it's just overriding the environments, but like I would have had to do that manually, but like now I don't. And but I can see what's there if I need it. And yeah, like I just turn on storage and now storage just works, right? And it just knows what to do inside the Laravel app to make sure I have to do nothing, which is great. So, yeah, I think all that stuff just really neat how it all works together and it knows a standard stack and how it should work and it makes sure that happens. Yeah. No, but like realizing I'm realizing now surprise was maybe wasn't the right word. Um, but more so just like even whenever I go into cloud, I feel like there's always like some little feature thing like I didn't know was added because there's like so much that's I like find it and I'm like, "Oh, this is really nice, right?" It just like touches like that. And I know like a big feature that everyone loves at least like internally is preview environments. Yep. So I've been uh We're just running on main and production in outro land. So I haven't played with them myself that much, but uh the rest of my team is using them for the other systems we've uh put onto Larl Cloud. So So yes, those are really cool. That's always a huge pain, right? To like do a staging environment is like always a disaster and it's never in sync with the actual production because you change something and whatever. So being able to just have that just out of the box is super cool. I'm sure I will use that in outro at some point. Um, so yeah, I like that a lot. Mhm. We have it like which I think Taylor's talked about it, but as soon as we open a PR on like the main branch for most of our repositories, it creates a preview environment link and just it's ready to go. Yeah. And then we can just open that to like review the PR and then of course we check code too. But especially if it's just like a copy change, anything like that, we can just look at the link like, "Oh, this looks good." Y ship it and then merge. And it makes it so much easier. Yeah, for sure. That's that's really cool. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on here to talk about Astro FM. It's probably time we start wrapping up. If anyone has any like last minute questions, feel free to throw them in chat now or forever hold your peace. Well, you can actually find Ian online fast to ask. Yeah, I'm not that hard to find. Yeah. Um, yeah. No, it was great coming out. I think it's so cool you guys are doing this and just spreading the word about Laravel Cloud and uh having cool people on the show and uh yeah, I'm glad to be part of it and be here and happy to come on anytime. We've been trying to make this happen for a while since at least San Francisco or maybe before January. Yeah. So, we got it done. It's only June. That's not even half a year. We're good. but yeah, great great to be on and thanks for having me. No. Yeah, I was thinking about that, too. I was like, dang, we've been trying to make this work since January, and that was supposed to be like last week, but then I just gotten back from Japan. I felt like a train had hit me. Yeah. No, can't do this. Probably better to uh Yeah. be fresh and ready. Yeah. No, but do you have any kind of like closing words you want to say about um Outro FM, any of this? Anything you're working on and then where people can find you offline? Yeah. So, um no, I mean, if you're if you have a podcast or know somebody who does or YouTube show or stream, check out outro.fm. Uh sign up for like you can right now it's like mostly podcast oriented the homepage. So, you like actually find your podcast and sign up. But there is a way to sign up even without a podcast. So you can do that. Um so I really appreciate that. Yeah. And I'll be sending out some emails and stuff soonish about getting into there. I should I want to do more with just even progress reports, but I kind of have feel like people should just listen to Mostly Technical. If you want progress reports, I do go over those on mostly technical mostly technical.com, which is my podcast with Aaron Francis. And uh yeah, I mean otherwise, you know, I'm out there on the internet. I'm on Twitter. Check out the podcast. We have a new podcast called Token Town um which is a AI developer oriented podcast. So check that out if you're into that stuff. And uh yeah, that's about it. Like trying to find all the links. I have most of them. Okay, so I pinned the outro FM one, the mostly technical one, and then your Twitter. Cool. There we go. I'm like, how fast can I get the token? Tokentown.com. It's straightforward. We paid a lot of money for that. Just because you paid a lot of money. I went and found the link and I will share it here. There we go. Nice. Yes. Thank you everyone for listening in. Thank you again, Ian. And yeah, bye everyone. I'll be on again next Tuesday for uh Laravel Cloud office hours with Devon. So, it'll be next Tuesday, I think, at 12:00 p.m. Eastern time. And I will schedule that here on YouTube as well. So, I'll see you all then. And bye bye. Thanks.