1041: What are normies using AI for?

Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

Wes and Scott explore how non-developers are utilizing AI agents to solve practical, everyday problems like finding car parts and managing f

Key takeaways

• AI is highly effective at parsing messy data, such as finding specific automotive parts on Taobao or identifying dimensions in hardware catalogs.
• Agents can significantly reduce the friction of home network troubleshooting, particularly for difficult tasks like printer driver installation.

Main topics

• AI for hardware and automotive parts
• Home network and printer troubleshooting

Notable quotes

I would rather slam my hand in the door than to go to HP's website and look for drivers.

Conclusion

The true value of AI for 'normies' lies in its ability to act as a spe

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) What is your favorite movie? AIs apparently love the pursuit of happiness, inception in the Martian. Holy crap. Is it so difficult of a question to have to farm it out to AI? Unbelievable. Like, and I, I feel for people applying to jobs as well, because like you hear people being like, yeah, I applied to like 20,000 jobs. Of course, I'm going to try to automate this thing. So now I'm just spraying and praying, but. It's unbelievable that everybody's just using the same answers. Like you can stand out so easily by just like not doing that. Past coders and past spreadsheets are normies using AI and what are they using it for, right? Is it just a glorified search engine where people are just typing their query into chat GPT or are there actual regular people outside of like developers that are using agents and actually getting work done outside of. building websites or like automating some sort of spreadsheet. So today, what we're going to do is we're going to go through a whole bunch of different instances. I asked the people in my life, I asked on Twitter what people in their lives are using AI for in their day-to-day tasks. And we're going to kind of go through them as well as like things like I don't think are going to hold up like automation marketing, you know, like, oh, wow, you sent 6,000 emails to everybody. Like that's... that's gonna not work Speaker 1 (1:22) in Speaker 2 (1:22) like Speaker 1 (1:22) three weeks my name is wes with me as always is scott how you doing scott oh it's so cold in the d today i am freezing man holy cow uh i don't know what happened we woke up this morning it's chilly chilly so yes i'm all bundled up cold d all right we can hopefully you warm up uh a Speaker 2 (1:41) little later Speaker 1 (1:42) let's get Speaker 2 (1:44) into it i'll uh link up the tweet as well in the replies for what everybody says. But first one we have here is just simply just parts finding. So we have a broken seat buckle in our van and I absolutely hate finding parts for. automotive stuff. Uh, because we have to do is you have to find the exact year and you have to use a stupid little dropdown where you have to filter every single car that's ever been made. And then you need to go through all of the different parts. And then there's like seven different trim levels of it. And then there's an eight seater and a seven seater. And it's just so frustrating, but finding parts is very easy. Now I just. type into the box or dictate it. We have a gray 2015 Toyota Santa and we need a new buckle for the left side. That's Speaker 1 (2:29) the Speaker 2 (2:29) other thing is I never I never remember like what is the left and right side of a car? Like, is it when you're looking at it or is it when you're sitting in it? Well, it's the Speaker 1 (2:37) driver's side or passenger side. But but that's that's no, that's Speaker 2 (2:42) because the passenger side is different around the world. Right. So they don't use that in in parts world. So I just said. what the seat behind me. And then it found the actual part. It drafted up the email. It sent it to the Toyota dealership. 100 % did it all for me. And all I had to do is actually pay for it. I just absolutely love it. Also, I have another one. We'll throw up the screenshot of it right now, which is when you're trying to find a specific bolt or bearing or roller, there's often like three different dimensions that you need to do, you know, like width, length, height. And these data sheets, if you've been on like McMaster car or any single website like this, there's like bazillion combinations of it. And one thing, which is Taobao, a website that I used to find like specific little parts, they have this new AI button that you click and it breaks it down into width, length, height. It will sort of just analyze all the options there. Ideally, you wouldn't even need AI for this because that data should be in the system. But when sellers have messy data that's been loaded into like a sales platform, it's not always that easy. And this does a great job of taking messy data and distilling it down for you. And Speaker 1 (3:59) if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io forward slash syntax. You can sign up today and get two months for free. Sentry is just a really incredible tool for not only tracking your performance, making sure your application has no bugs, but even just seeing what goes wrong when something goes wrong, because things go wrong all the time when we're coding. And you don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case. something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io forward slash syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right. Another thing I like to use it for is the stuff that's annoying within your household network, like printers and things like that. We have a printer on the network and it just stopped. It stopped working in terms of like the printer's on. It says it's connected, but everything that you print to it says it can't be. I mean, this is classic printer stuff. And I just get on my agent and I say, I got this HP whatever printer. They're trying to get it to connect. Can you like help me walk through some troubleshooting steps or whatever? And we did it. And then eventually found it on the network, repaired the like rebuilt, whatever, re-added the printer or whatever on my computer, got it set up, printed in no time. And that's the type of thing where like you're hunting for like reinstalling drivers on HP's website. I would rather slam my hand in the door than go to HP's website and look for drivers. That might be Speaker 2 (5:30) the number one use case for AI is not having to fuss with your printer anymore. Speaker 2 (5:35) My sister gave me what's called a skylight calendar. I'm just holding up a photo of Speaker 1 (5:42) it Speaker 2 (5:42) right here. And this is just like, it's one of these calendars that you will stick in your kitchen and it has like photos and everything. And she gave it to me because she got it and the Wi-Fi doesn't work on it. Like it just doesn't find any more. She's like, I don't know. Like they sent me a new one. Maybe you can fix it. So I like, I cracked it open and it's not any like, it's not like a. like a cable or anything like that. So what I did is I just like stuck codecs on it and it's like, it's, it's, it's an Android tablet. It rooted the entire thing. It flashed Speaker 1 (6:15) a Speaker 2 (6:15) custom firmware to it and like ran all of these tests and I didn't fix the wifi. But it ended up bridging the Wi-Fi from my MacBook to the calendar so it could get past some specific things. And now I'm trying to figure out, like, can I have like an external Wi-Fi? I think the chip on it is busted. But the fact where you have all of this landfill material, which is just like it literally doesn't work. They sent me a new one. I don't know what to do with it. And it went from that to like now I have this like. massive touchscreen android tablet for free which i can probably get internet working with a dongle or wired or something like that unbelievable like the the amount of people taking back tech that they have purchased or gotten for free found at a thrift store is huge use case and like i'm slightly technical like i obviously that played a part in it but i I don't think you could. I think that regular people would be able to plug in a USB cord and say, hey, help me hold buttons and figure this out. Speaker 1 (7:19) Yeah, I know. It's so funny the amount of stuff that AI is good with that kind of thing. I saw Justin Trader. He was trying to get Omachi, some kind of thing working on his MacBook. Yeah, like MacBook drivers for the video card. Yeah, and he put it in front of a mirror. and had the webcam like checking using a mirror. So good. It's so good. Yeah. That's Speaker 2 (7:44) what I did with my, the lights in my office is I pointed the, I pointed it at the, the light and said like, try turn it on, you know? And it just like did something, looked at the thing. It's super token hungry. Cause it has a process, all of the images. Yeah. But even then I was thinking like, there was a lot of this Android stuff where I would have to like hold a button. and have it reboot, and then it would go into the ADB mode. And I was like, man, I should just solder on some wires to this thing and let the AI push the buttons itself. Yeah, push the buttons. It Speaker 1 (8:18) would Speaker 2 (8:18) go ahead. Speaker 1 (8:19) Yeah, I know. I did the same thing with my prompt boy. The computer was speaking into it to test the transcribing audio. I did the same thing with the Ricci Mini where it was taking a spelling test with my computer speakers. Like being able to have that loop of you not having to physically push the buttons or whatever can really unlock a whole lot because it can just work through these issues on its own. Speaker 2 (8:42) Quite a few people says they have friends that are like contractors and like there are builders, as you say, in the UK. And they use it for red tape, bureaucracy, filling out forms, permits, running over things, making sure everything looks OK before it's submitted. Huge use case. I use that all the time. The school sends all these like Google forms that you have to like fill out and whatever. Or like they'll send over a PDF where you have to like I had to renew my passport a couple of weeks ago. And like, I hate using PDFs to fill out information. So frustrating. The copy paste doesn't work half the time. And text inputs Speaker 1 (9:17) are always like out of whack with the form. Yeah, text Speaker 2 (9:19) inputs are weird. Or like in Canada, the formatting for a postal code is really weird. It has sometimes they're all uppercase. Sometimes you need a space. Sometimes you don't need a space. Super frustrating. Where it's just like, I don't care. Here is the loose of all of my information. You figure out how to get it into all of these boxes and fill it out Speaker 1 (9:40) for Speaker 2 (9:40) me. Such a huge time saver. Speaker 1 (9:41) Sorry, I would keep talking, but the trash people are coming and it's loud. Trash people. No good. No good. Speaker 2 (9:48) Okay, so this one is technical. And by trash people, Speaker 1 (9:51) I don't mean React users. Just kidding. Speaker 2 (9:54) Rough. Speaker 1 (9:55) I know. I'm sorry. I like React sometimes. This one Speaker 2 (9:58) is technical. Updating NAS and Docker containers. But I think like a lot of people are like tech adjacent and they want to be able to like host their own Plex or whatever. Like they're able to get that up and running. But when it comes to updating or organizing files or fixing something that has happened, like I can't tell you how many times I've tried to open an app that's on my NAS and the thing is just busted. It's so much easier for regular people just to like. let an agent rip on it and self-host this stuff. Speaker 1 (10:35) Yeah, I have a bunch of rips of my DVDs and stuff, like full disc rips, right? And because of that, it's like it rips. Yeah. And you can't play those on Plex or whatever. So I just set up a process that will regularly check a folder and go through and. pull out all the extras and set it up in the correct format and correct file format that both Jellyfin and Plex can understand. Because I'm running Plex and Jellyfin side by side right now. So having an agent to be able to work through the proper way to get the folders in a way that it's not going to ruin anything has been very instrumental for me. Speaker 2 (11:18) Another one is like, like home assistant. So one problem that you have with home assistant is I've got like 25 different integrations from these like random companies. Yeah. And then what