Introductions and the premise

00:06James Hartt All right. Hello and welcome. This is the AgentSee podcast. My name is James and this is,

00:11Abrar Mahmood Abrar, and we're looking forward to having you on board today.

00:16James Hartt Yeah, absolutely. We are, both developers. We worked together, a couple of years ago now. And, yeah, we're basically trying to set up a, an AI powered agency software agency. I'm sure a lot of people are at the Moment. But we want to make one of our own flavor and yeah really we want to carry on making software in this new world And really

00:39Abrar Mahmood Thank

00:39James Hartt Yeah let's go down to business so yeah my background is sort Of started off making software with mobile apps when the app store started that was kind of my in for software it was good timing did that for a number Of years until it got a bit boring and then started expanding into sort of more full stacky things and just working for companies in Brighton making streaming software through to like yeah working with Abrar agency and then at an agency which is One of the reasons why we think we can have a go ourselves and then yeah I've now worked for a startup called fan And then yeah want to create something that's more of my own along with Abrar and see where it goes

01:22Abrar Mahmood Yep, so my background, so I've been in the software development Sector for over a decade now professionally. I first started software when I was really young. I actually first got into coding in C, which was quite challenging. That was really young, but the motivation was really there Because that was me coding and modifying computer games which is always a really exciting way to get into it

01:53James Hartt Manual memory management as well.

01:55Abrar Mahmood Absolutely lots of manual memory management and like it's something I've been taking for granted for almost all of my professional career Which feels a bit mad but there we go

02:06James Hartt I mean, that's what you had

02:07Abrar Mahmood Yeah

02:07James Hartt To do at the start of iOS, yeah, anyway,

02:09Abrar Mahmood Interesting

02:09James Hartt Carry on. Yeah.

02:10Abrar Mahmood Yeah so I've been working at an agency for quite a long time at the moment I've got my own startup Called GrayDrive where as a lot of businesses are utilizing ai quite heavily for the product I'm now working with James as part of agency here and looking forward to sharing our experiences with you.

02:35James Hartt So obviously kind of touched on the premise a little bit really agent like if anyone's here has interacted with an agency Before a software agency they kind of know the flow of things they know that they would have sort of had sort of various client meetings Lots of potentially specs like or some sort of relationship gets built and you and you trust them a bit more with actually sort of Developing what you want and having a bit more of a looser thing you have lots of obviously meetings to sort of deliver software planning like Things like that obviously the thing that the every agency was trying to protect was developers because that was the people That made the software so it was a combination of sort of driving down the costs of them and protecting their time

03:22Abrar Mahmood It's what they

03:22James Hartt And

03:23Abrar Mahmood Describe as the resource, isn't it?

03:24James Hartt Yes the resource yeah which obviously neither us want to be known in such terms like but yeah we both Worked at well you've is at the previous place that we worked together that was the only agency that you ever worked at

03:39Abrar Mahmood Yes,

03:40James Hartt Yeah so

03:40Abrar Mahmood That's

03:40James Hartt I've

03:40Abrar Mahmood Correct.

03:41James Hartt Worked at a couple I started off well my second proper software job was an agency in brighton and that was quite Some time ago now a very different world to the one now but yeah you You really did feel like the developer was the sort of the most sort of stressed aspect of the whole endeavor Is that they're not necessarily stressed them but like the focus was was all on it was that you it was billing for developer time billing For like and everything around it was kind of like set up to facilitate their work

04:18Abrar Mahmood I think

04:18James Hartt And

04:19Abrar Mahmood I think the other thing to add to that is I think from our perspective being engineers it feels like we are the Most stressed but I think there's another

04:28James Hartt Yeah Yeah.

04:28Abrar Mahmood Part to it which is because developers are relatively expensive there's quite a lot of stress in making sure There's always work for them as well

04:38James Hartt Yes absolutely

04:39Abrar Mahmood And that's

04:39James Hartt Absolutely

04:39Abrar Mahmood Another part of it which

04:41James Hartt Making

04:41Abrar Mahmood Is stressful

04:42James Hartt Busy work yeah But obviously that changes quite a lot when you can prompt working software from a few few words Potentially

04:54Abrar Mahmood YOLO

04:55James Hartt Yeah well yeah obviously none of us want to sort of release absolute garbage five coded slop onto the world but you Like a that can be done right and a lot of in the old world a lot of clients would pay for that level of output

05:11Abrar Mahmood Yep.

05:12James Hartt Whereas do they pay for that now so yeah that's the premise obviously and we want to make an agency that fits into this new World and doesn't and takes the advantages of some of these products rather than sort of not so yeah and then moving on to that we this is the show That hopefully we will answer some of the questions that need to be answered to set up a an agency and make it Worth people paying money for and feel like they're actually getting value and make a product and see a see a product be created that they Want to pay for so yeah I think that's basically the intro

05:52Abrar Mahmood I think it's really worth helming into that point of being an agency where we are of course using Cutting -edge tools that are more easily accessible than ever

06:05James Hartt Yeah.

06:05Abrar Mahmood However there's still a real detail there which is making sure that what we are delivering is of significant Value over people going in and attempting this themselves like there's

06:17James Hartt Absolutely.

06:17Abrar Mahmood A lot to it outside of LLMs and of course like this is kind of like theme that we're going to be going down like all of this is kind Of based around that theme of using AI and just because it's so accessible doesn't necessarily mean like it's Easy to get significant useful value out of it so I think

06:37James Hartt Yeah well

06:38Abrar Mahmood That's kind of what we can dive into a little bit

06:41James Hartt I think if anyone has had a play at prompting either using any of the no code sort of startups like if you've done anything other Than a single session you do start to realize when it starts to fall apart

06:54Abrar Mahmood And

06:54James Hartt When

06:54Abrar Mahmood I think yeah sorry and I think from a project level just taking

06:58James Hartt When...

06:58Abrar Mahmood A step back like single session is. One thing multiple sessions is like another layer on top of that but But. My recent experience with LLMs is very much when you take a few steps above that, getting a project from zero To is relatively easy with LLMs. But getting that last is really what's still just as challenging as it Always used to be.

07:21James Hartt Yeah.

07:22Abrar Mahmood So that's where I think we'll really provide some value.

07:25James Hartt Yeah it's that final step the route to production

07:29Abrar Mahmood Absolutely.

07:29James Hartt I think that's what you will end up having to pay for Nice great so just a bit of a wrap up we'll be trying to produce these episodes with some sort of regularity and we Will be inviting guests on we'll be answering a few of the questions on our on our website agent C dot work And we look forward to seeing you all soon all

07:54Abrar Mahmood Thank you very much for having us.

07:55James Hartt Right Cheers thanks a lot I'll see you

07:57Abrar Mahmood Cheers

07:58James Hartt Bye

07:58Abrar Mahmood Bye bye