The Exchanges

Q And maybe explain to folks, you know, why, why are you using GitHub? Why are you pushing into GitHub?

A For sure. So, uh, GitHub is a, um, uh, version control system and a collaboration system. So if you want to, uh, put something open source so that other people can contribute to it, other people can use it and open issues, uh, for you, um, and tell you, like, here's what's missing, here's what's working and what's not working. Uh, you can, you can use GitHub for that. And so you can think about a Replit. Replit is the sort of real-time interface for creating applications. You can use Replit for deployment, for editing, even for collaboration, but it's more real-time. You can think about GitHub as the more long-term sort of storage for your app. So if you want to, uh, keep it version there, they have a lot of really interesting tools to help you manage your application. Uh, people can download your code. And again, there's this feature called per requests where people in open source or people on your team can send you, can send you a per request. Uh, this is true of GitHub and other places like GitLab. You can do all of that from Replit. So here we are, I think, in like, you know, uh, you know, 15, 20 minutes, we were able to build an application, we deployed it, we did a data migration, we moved it to SQL, we pushed it to GitHub, and we're on our way. Like, if this was a real project, I've already made real progress, uh, towards my Scenic Drives startup. Which, if you built tha…

AI assessment note: “GitHub is a, um, uh, version control system and a collaboration system.”

Q And do you mind just zooming in a little bit as well?

A Yeah. So this is Replit's homepage. So we're going to use the agent at least as the access point. So we'll, we'll go into the coding as well, but Replit agent is like great at setting up the project. So we're going to use that to kind of set up the project, get the initial, get the initial prototype going. Um, and you could, of course, create the project manually, and we'll cover that in a bit, but let's go through the agent now. So I just type, like just in a sentence, like a map of scenic drives in the Bay Area. I have no idea where it's going to pull the data from. I have no idea what libraries it's going to use. And again, just a simple idea, and we can hit start building now. So this tells me it's still in early access. Um, Now, uh, any minute now we should go into a chat interface. Um, and the agent should start working on proposing, uh, a plan for me.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. So this is Replit's homepage.”

Q And I don't think people realize how amazing this is. As, you know, I'm a pretty bad engineer, and the fact that you've abstracted all of this away, and just basically you press a button and it's deployed securely, like this is How big of a deal is this?

A It's a pretty big deal. Like, uh, like again, when, uh, I mean, if you, if you want to try to, like, figure out, you know, for example, like how to deploy to, how to deploy to AWS, uh, let's see here what Google tells us. Uh, first of all, you need to look for something is AWS Amplify. It gives you a choice code deploy or amplify. Okay. What does that mean? Uh, so you get started under deliver, you choose deploy and continue, name your app and environment, just like the app and the code of the console is save deploy. And so you need to figure out how to use the AWS CLI. You need to figure out how to, uh, put your application code in there. So you need to use something called SCP and FTP. What the hell is this? Like, What is SCP and how do you use it? So now you're down this thing called secure copy protocol and you need to be able to, uh, use it, you know, open a shell and, and, and type a command and know how to use it. And you're already down a rabbit hole that you really don't want to be down. And so for us here, we're just really trying to make it a couple of clicks. You get all the security and all the features you need out of really any kind of, um, the best, uh, cloud providers available. And, and, uh, uh, I will say also our prices are very, very affordable, are in line with, are very competitive in line with, uh, really top, top cloud providers.

AI assessment note: “It's a pretty big deal.”

Q And I recommend people use Replit AI here as just, as, you know, to slow down and use Replit AI if you're trying to learn. Right?

A Yeah, exactly. And it also has access to your code base. And so here, you know, uh, our agent created, uh, the Postgres DB and wrote a little more code. And so I can say, like, explain my code. And it should do that step by step. So it will, it's going line by line. So if you go to main.py, you can see that it is, uh, you know, working on getting the database connection and everything. And it's saying, uh, we're Creating the data. We're loading the data. We're creating the map and, and really step by step. And so you can also describe exactly what the agent does. And this is especially important when the agent hits sort of dead end or a problem, which happens. It's a little very, very early technology. Uh, you would want to use a rapid AI to do, to do some of the debugging. So here we see the database was created by the agent. And, um, and the app is, is working. And now the app, uh, It should be using the, the new database. And so here we, we have a scenic drives table, and we have the data inside the table. So it, it migrated from the CSV. It took it to the database. It reran the project, and the app is still working. We have the scenic drives. So it's asking us, is it loading correctly? So I, you know, it did the migration. Is it loading? Yes, it's loading correctly. Displaying. So I, I can't emphasize how much, um, work that saved me. You know, typically I would have to go …

AI assessment note: “Yeah, exactly. And it also has access to your code base.”

Q And while, while that's loading, you know, how in depth of a prompt should it be? You know, how short, how in depth, you know, what do, what do you see as, as best practice?

A You know, I, I like short prompts because, um, I like short prompts because the way I program is I have like an inkling of an idea and I like to do it in iterative fashion. And so it also depends how, how you think. I think it's easy to overcomplicate things at the, uh, at the top. And so I like to see something on the screen before getting in and like, uh, you know, adding more complexity. So, you know, here it's kind of pick the stack. It's going to use Streamlit. That's, that's fine by me. It's going to build the initial prototype. And, uh, you know, it, it proposes all sorts of interesting features that we can add, but I'm just going to go with the prototype here. So, and then we can add some more features as we go. Um, and so the first thing you'll notice is it'll just start cranking out code, and it's really fun to watch it crank out code, and you can even sort of start reading and learning maybe what it's, uh, what it's doing. Here it's like creating, creating the data with the, with the, with the drives. I think it's just making it up for now. We can ask it to pull it from somewhere in a bit. Um, it's now installing the packages. Uh, so this is, you know, all the Python environment packages you would need to, to be able to make this application. Realize it needs to install a little bit more packages here. And now it's going to configure the app to, to run. Um, and this …

AI assessment note: “I like short prompts because the way I program is I have like an inkling”