80: The Big Announcement W/ Taylor Otwell  ## Metadata - Author: [[Mostly Technical]] - Full Title: 80: The Big Announcement W/ Taylor Otwell - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/b41510aa-fce9-4b66-bca4-96cb920d75e0 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Announcing Laracon US Party** - Ian and Aaron announce a party at Laracon US as a community gathering event the night before the conference begins. - They expect limited tickets and involvement from the Laravel team for a relaxed social experience. Transcript: Speaker 1 Well, should we talk about our big announcement? Speaker 3 Let's talk about our big announcement. Let's tell Taylor because I don't think Taylor probably knows. So let's talk about our big announcement in front of Taylor. Taylor knows everything that happens in his company, but this one he might not know. We'll find out pretty quickly. Ian, give him the big announcement. All right. We are having a party at Laracon US. Oh, wow. The mostly technical day zero party at Laracon US. Wow, this is crazy. Speaker 2 What's the details on this? Speaker 1 It's going to be at around 830, day zero, before the first day. And it's gonna be a couple hours gonna have some drinks gonna have some uh snacks of some sort i don't know if that's totally figured out yet yeah um yeah it's just gonna be a place to hang Out i think we're gonna have 150 tickets available so not room for everyone so you will have to reserve your spot we're gonna have that link up hopefully uh when the show goes live you can Go to mostly technical.com check out the uh there'll be a link for the party reserve your spot if you're going to laracon us which you should be of course and i think it's gonna be cool we're Gonna have some of the laravel team there and that's gonna be awesome yeah i think it'll be cool to have like a night before gathering in the community i don't know i don't know if this laracon Speaker 2 Has a lot of stuff going on like a lot of kind of extra stuff like this, which is, which is pretty cool and kind of new. Speaker 1 What are some of the other big things? What else is happening around it? Speaker 2 Well, like, you know, I mean, similar to last year with the basketball game, we're doing, we're doing a sporting event. I don't, I don't know if I can, I don't know if it's been publicly announced what we're doing so i won't do it we're doing a sports related activity the day before and of course we got this Mostly technical thing i've heard about like a rooftop get together at some point um of course we'll be doing the after party stuff like usual um there's like a separate vendor hall this Year it's just like a bigger better event i have some cool people on stage too that we haven't had on stage in a while like um evan you from vjs we're gonna do a panel with me adam evan and then We added jeffrey way to the panel as well so jeffrey way back on the laracon stage so it'll be it'll be good back on the stage jeffrey way back at the stage evan up there that's my whole development Speaker 3 Life right there the three of you and jeffrey way that's like my whole career so that'll be fun man i was talking to uh so first thank you to hank and sam and your people over there who've Speaker 1 Been helping us organize the party and diagonal who is sponsoring the party yeah um so we have i think another sponsor coming on too so you have to register so make sure you register yes It will be free but i just have to register so thanks to the sponsors big thanks to your team for helping us get it organized um but uh but yeah i was yeah i was talking to them um and i almost Feel like because they were saying some of the stuff you guys have going on too and i feel like it's like i love the format of lara con and i don't want it to get bigger in a sense but then there's Also like literally not enough time kind of for like all this stuff going like there's all these like like you said like ancillary things kind of happening and it's like but there's like Literally not enough days like we need more days to like fit the stuff in so it's kind of interesting yeah i'm looking forward to it i think it'll be fun um i'm excited about the talks i think Speaker 2 Everything will be great. It'll be my first time in Denver, actually. Me too. Speaker 3 I've never been in Denver. Yeah. So I think I'll be moderating the panel with the four of y'all, and I will try my hardest to do a great job. But one thing I can promise is that I will not fall asleep on stage. So I'll just say that. I know. Bummer. Speaker 1 That's a low bar. Stay conscious during the Q&A. Stay conscious, yes. I don't know. I'm going to be feeding Aaron those shots the night before and see if we can get him real tired. It's my pal. Speaker 3 Yeah, that'll be perfect. Speaker 1 That's exactly what we want to say. Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. Watch out for dog bites, too. No dog bites. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 3 Apparently, Sam Selikoff confirmed he was the one that got bit the year before. Yeah, I remember that. We're two for two on dog bites at Dax's house. Not great. Speaker 1 It's been kind of low drama. Knock wood. Hopefully that continues. Yeah. Speaker 2 We had no injuries or people falling asleep. Yeah. Speaker 1 Oh, man. Yeah. So you didn't go to Denverver to uh prep the site or anything either right so now you got no like uh hank and sam did they went out to denver they walked through the venue they sent me pictures Speaker 2 They loved it um so yeah i was good with it so yeah it'll be my literally my first time like in the city of denver um so be a fun time yeah um yeah i like the vendor hall i did too I think they were Speaker 1 Saying that this way, it's just like that noise is its own space and there's no issues there. Speaker 2 Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I'm pumped. Speaker 3 Is this the first one you haven't had to plan yourself? Speaker 2 Yeah, kind of. Like starting in, what was it? The Nashville year, which was 2023. That was actually the first year I hired like an event company who we're still working with through this year. But I was still kind of making all the like high level decisions that year and last year for Dallas. This year, I have tried to like just kind of turn the reins loose and let the team run with it and kind of put their own stamp on it and not really step in or micromanage the whole event. So like just the other day, I actually messaged Hank and I was like, hey, what's the stage look like this year? You know, which is like really different than previous years where I would have been super involved in like figuring that out. So yeah, I mean, I'm trying to do that in a lot of areas around the company, honestly, where I've like done every little detail in the past and I'm trying to let other people kind of find Their way. Speaker 3 No, what do you still do? PRs. I know. Yeah. Speaker 2 PRs like honestly, just like feature review. Like if there's a big new feature on cloud, I like go in, use it, like try to figure out what makes sense. Doesn't make sense. Or even like when we're first thinking about the features, thinking about in general, how they should work, you know, with the product managers and stuff. You ([Time 0:09:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0423e2ef-4331-459d-8f45-ec66ddf1b564)) - **Forge’s Unique Market Position** - Forge continues strong with many thousands of happy users, focusing on high customizability and flexibility for niche needs. - Laravel maintains both Forge and Cloud to cater to diverse user preferences and use cases effectively. Transcript: Speaker 2 Yeah, it's going to be good. There's some cool stuff coming at Laracon. Big updates, big Forge updates. Speaker 3 I have heard, I was just listening to you and matt staufer i heard all the forge teasing and that sounds that sounds very exciting i've seen james talk about it a little bit he is he the head Of the forge team he is team lead on forge yeah okay yeah it sounds super exciting and the only one that i guessed was the envoyer one which you admitted on that everyone guesses that yeah So i'm excited to see what else y'all have been cooking up um so what yeah what's the like what's the idea with forge because i know a lot of people were kind of down on it and being like oh Speaker 2 They're gonna take forge away clearly that's not happening i mean you know my perspective on on it is we have many many many, many thousands of happy customers on Forge. There's a high level of customizability on Forge that people really like. They like installing their niche little extensions and the little tools they need for their app to run. And that's just hard to do, like on a fully managed platform, at least for now. And, you know, I think hey like we need to keep making this better um we need to like go harder on it be more ambitious with it because we have a lot of people using it enjoying it so let's like Keep and keep working on it um so we've done a lot you know the envoy stuff that everyone guessed is honestly maybe not even the biggest part of like what we've been working on on Forge. So I'm super pumped. It's gonna have a fresh new look, you know, lots of cool new features. So yeah, definitely not a slowing down on the Forge development pace. Speaker 3 I like this because you're, I think you said this to Matt, your biggest competitor to Forge is cloud and the biggest competitor to cloud is Forge. And so you're like, you're running the Procter and Gamble or the Johnson and Johnson playbook where it's like, we own it all, pick whatever you want. It's all us guys. So I like that. Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and like, I want in some ways it's, it's funny to me because forge is a little bit more like unique of a product, I guess, because, you know, cloud is a fully managed platform and Lots of people have done fully managed platforms, right? Whether all the way back to Heroku or whatever. But not a lot of people have really built this really high quality server VPS management tool that's very deep on Laravel, but maybe potentially on other things as well. So to me, it's like, I don't know. It's kind of a unique tool and has its own little corner of the market that is not very well served. So I'm a Forge fan still. I love Forge. Great. Speaker 1 Just the other day, I was doing a new help spot website and like I ended up just putting out on Forge because I was like playing with the cloud. And then like, but there was something weird. It's like for older legacy stuff, too. It's like Forge. I know I can just do anything right. It doesn't need like any special settings. Like if I had to put some weird thing on there, I can do whatever weird stuff I want because it's fully customizable. So yeah, it's just great to have that like ultimate flexible tool. Right. And then you have cloud, which will probably creep in on that. I assume over time. Right. But like, but up until that point you know it's like going to be a little more dialed in i think on like applications and like kind of the core stuff like that and not so much on everybody's Random edge case it's gonna be a while till you get to every random edge case on cloud um so you still have forge for yeah you got weird edge case great like just yep get. Literally do anything. Yeah. Do whatever you need to do. And yeah, I don't know. I still love Forge. It's good stuff. Speaker 3 Taylor, have you looked at, have you looked at DHH's, what is it? Kamal? That thing. Have you looked at that at all? Speaker 2 Yeah. I've looked at it a little bit and I saw him demo it live at Rails World in Toronto. I mean, yeah it seems fine like i i probably you know i would just rather use forge or cloud or something but um it seems pretty cool you know dhh is always like kind of against the grain and Doing his own thing and blazing his own trail um so it's a little bit more like complicated than even like forgege, you know, more than I would want to bite off. But that's cool. It's DHH, you know, he can do what he wants. He drives race cars. Speaker 3 He's earned that. He can kind of do whatever he wants. Speaker 1 Yeah. He's not so much worried at this point. I feel like about like the usability of things necessarily either. You know, it's like, I mean, I think with Basecamp, I'm sure he is. But these other things, it's like this is the tool for our use case yeah if you want to come along that's great but he's not like trying to make it easy to use necessarily yeah i think you're Speaker 2 Right like it's not like the um it's not built for the same reasons that rails was built it's like more ideological against the system like against the corporate you know like man that's More of a overcharging than yeah it's more of a yeah yeah where to me rails was like very yeah very like polished and about the dx and all of that yeah yeah yeah that's kind of interesting Speaker 1 How that occurred because like i mean it was sort of a statement against the way things were at the time too but it was done with a much like broader outlook right you would say i think like It was really a general purpose tool i feel like he was trying to build and i don't there's other stuff that's coming after i don't i don't feel like that's ([Time 0:21:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/87e12669-8daa-42cd-97da-fb8afb944593)) - **AI Accelerates Laravel Development** - Taylor Otwell uses AI tools like Cursor to quickly generate and style Laravel code snippets, improving productivity. - The team widely uses AI for boilerplate code generation and testing to accelerate development workflows. Transcript: Speaker 3 Rate ever so it's like who do we listen to here but yeah it's it's doing well and i did change the thumbnail to see if it would do any better and i don't i don't think it's done any better so Um once again maybe don't listen to reddit um but yeah it's been doing great and a lot of a lot of positive comments i feel like cringe thumbnail is like that's what you're supposed to do Speaker 1 Yeah like that's what they all are they're all like oh that's weird and that's why they work yeah but reddit hates everything yeah what are you guys using taylor what are you using for Your ai are you like coding wise you going between chat gpt and not or you are you cursor or what are you doing um i'll pop open cursor like if i want to if i'm actually working on a Laravel Speaker 2 Thing and I want to try AI, if it's something quick, like how do I do this? And it's just like, it's going to be a few lines of code. Sometimes I'll just use chat GPT directly and copy it out. Yeah. The other day I popped open cursor. I don't know. We got a PR to Laravel and it was the auto discovery, like, API resources that are linked to your model. So usually we'd have your model in, like, appmodelsuser.php, and you have your resources in, like, apphtpresourcesuserresource or something like that. Someone sent a PR to, like, find those based on conventions. So if you know you have a user model, you kind of know where the resource for that is. But it only worked it assumed like the app directory was the name of the directory instead of like you know how people do the ddd stuff and blah blah they go down all these rabbit holes and I wanted it to be like more generic so that no matter where the model's directory was it just found the closest like sibling resource if that makes sense so i popped open cursor like explained That and there's like bam bam bam one shot good i changed like the styling a little bit to be kind of otwell style and then and then shipped it so yeah i'll pop it open occasionally um you Know i use it to run a lot of boilerplate stuff too like tests um yeah at least to get me started so not all in on it but still poking around yeah you're probably not coding as much as you were Either yeah that's true um the team uses you know we have a cursor license for the team um so i think a lot of the team is using cursor pretty much every day i just started using codex have Speaker 3 Y'all heard of this it's like a command line tool from open ai and like a week and a half ago it it only worked with ChatGPT. And then like a week ago, a few days later, they were like, yeah, fine. It can work with any model because somebody forked it and made an open codex, of course, as they do. And so OpenAI was like, yeah, we'll do it first or second in this case. And it's really nice because I use PHPStorm and there's not really like a good story there for an editor or an assistant. And this is just like runs in the command line, interacts with files, asks you questions, like confirms commands before it runs. And it can do all kinds of stuff like it can look around, you know, look around your computer, run Git commands, run NPM install, all of that. And it's like it's really good so i hooked it up to i think i hooked it up to gemini 2.5 um and i had it do some stuff and it was it was pretty impressive and i like i don't know i i like it being Outside of my editor because i don't like it when it's like getting in my way when i'm trying to just like you know hand write some code and so i find that is a good trade-off. Speaker 1 I check that out because I do, definitely the worst part about all these editors for me is that they're not PHP Storm. I know. I greatly prefer PHP Storm. And so it's like, oh, like Cursor, it's so VS Code-y, obviously. And like, it's like, I don't really care for much of the VS Code sort of mindset. And so, yeah, maybe that'll be something to look. I know Anthropic had a thing like that. I didn't realize OpenAI did. I saw OpenAI is looking to buy that Windsurfer thing too or whatever. So I guess they'll probably have their own VS Code knockoff entrant at some point as well. But yeah, maybe I'll try that. That's interesting because that's fine. Like you said, it is annoying sometimes the chat window is like overtaking the like code window. Speaker 3 And it's like you got a lot of stuff going on there so just in the terminal or you type out like four characters and the auto completes like here's a hundred lines of code and you're like Speaker 2 That's none of that is what i was gonna say yeah that part's really frustrating it's all wrong yeah i'm really curious how like ai will impact developers perception of like dx in general You know because like when we when i was first building laravel and like even back to the rails topic like so much of what we focused on was like ([Time 0:41:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2da2f111-405f-4487-9e48-d1c054be8b16)) - **AI May Redefine Developer Experience** - The rise of AI may change developer experience, shifting focus from perfect syntax to effective outcomes. - AI could redefine code style and complexity, optimizing for machine understanding rather than just human readability. Transcript: Speaker 2 It's all wrong yeah i'm really curious how like ai will impact developers perception of like dx in general you know because like when we when i was first building laravel and like even Back to the rails topic like so much of what we focused on was like every character of the syntax you know what i mean and like will people even care anymore you know if like the ai writes Speaker 1 All the code anyway like who cares what the syntax is it's kind of sad it is kind of sad or you have to even wonder if it's going to go farther than that of like what's optimal for the ai exactly Like in some ways worse dx or like might be even better for the ai yeah worse human dx worse human dx yeah like maybe like every function should have this crazy long name that's right the Ai will understand it better if it's like a sentence long name for this function you know and things kind of wild yeah rather than you finding the perfect otweld word that like the single Word it's like nope we'll just write it as a huge sentence and call this huge function everywhere and doesn't matter because everything's fast now and ai understands it better and that's It uh it's a crazy world i also kind of wonder what do you you guys think about i still don't know like obviously i feel like all the ai stuff is so tuned to code right and they're like just Training it more and more in code i don't know i wonder if other industries are going to get like this right like where it's like like that's the theory of course right everybody's like Of course ai is going to be in every industry and it's going to act just like this but like not every industry is like coding is like coding is so perfect for this it's all text and blah blah Like i don't know i don't know maybe it will be maybe it won't be i'm so torn i'm like i don't know can you replace the doctor can you not can you replace like obviously it's physical things Speaker 3 That'll be harder to replace but i don't know i feel like coding there's the a huge corpus of data on which they can train and And I just don't feel like that's the case for most industries. And with coding, like you can run this AI and then you can verify if the output is correct. Like do my test pass or does the app work or however loosey-goosey you want to do it, you can verify, yeah, the thing works. I feel like with everything else, except maybe like math, it's hard to just verify if it works. So like you have it right. You're an attorney and you have it right. A brief. And it's like, first of all, what's a brief? I have no idea. And then second of all, it's like, was it right? Was it good? Who can say good luck? Go present it. I don't know. It feels weird to me. Speaker 1 Is some tricky stuff there, like with a legal brief, for example, right, where if one word is wrong, that word could be incredibly important and change the entire meaning of the whole Thing. And lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Right. And it's not like quite like code where you can have like a unit test that's like ensuring that the thing you want to happen is still happening, even if it happens in a weird way that you Don't understand or you wouldn't write it yourself that way. The end it's spitting out the correct value um whereas like an illegal contract it's not true and if like you miss that it's uh that word is off it could be incredibly expensive so yeah Speaker 2 I don't know yeah i just saw that like i just saw the other day bill gates predicted a two-day work week within the next decade for most people next decade that seems like so incredibly Speaker 1 Far-fetched to me yeah so far-fetched no way i mean it's just not even like society would have to change dramatically to even allow such a thing first of all but like even putting that Aside yeah just most people's job like i don't know has ai unlocked a two-day work week for anyone and on the entire planet thus far? Speaker 2 I don't think so. I kind of think no. Speaker 1 No. And with the economics, I mean, I just feel like, okay, in an industry where it creates huge efficiencies, I mean, if it goes traditional tech, it's just going to actually make more jobs In that industry, but not necessarily like less work. Or if it does go the route of replacing, then it's not going to be like everybody has two hour two day work week it's going to be like well there's 20 of the people working five days a week Like they always were but there's just 80 less of them or whatever than there were before but everybody working two hours at the same or two days the same salary i don't know that's never Speaker 3 Going to happen i feel like people are already only working you know 40 of their time when they're at work so they're not gonna give them three days off no way people uh people get nervous Speaker 2 About this i had someone dm me not too long ago and they were like i'm really depressed i'm on like anxiety medication because i think the ai is gonna like destroy my career that i worked So hard on i was like I don't know. I don't know what to say. I was just like, I said something like, do you, do you pay for any AI generated app now? Like, have you even seen a good AI generated app once? No. The most impressive thing is that Peter Level's flying game so far. No, I don't. So I don't know. Speaker 1 I love, I use AI every day, but obviously it's just still such a long way to go. Yeah, it's a useful tool for sure. It's like another tool in the bag, but I don't know. Like even with help spots, like this is the thing I think I've talked about. It's a little bit on the show, but it's like, man, two years ago, I was like, oh, that's it. Fold it up. Like it's just going to be AI customer service. Right. Like all the customer service tools have added ai but like hasn't replaced us yet you know and like i think there's a lot to do there and i think customer service much like coding is one Of the areas where you could see some big changes but it's also not like an overnight thing and also just there's still going to be a place for the human aspect there's's a lot of things That just aren't AI-able, like that are just everything is a one-off. We have a lot of customers where like every request they get is a one-off. So like that's not true. Like whenever a SaaS app, that's not true, right? Because you're getting the same questions about pricing and how do I do thing X and whatever. And that's probably more automatable. But if you're like the Yukon library, you're not necessarily getting like a ton of automatable questions. Right. So, yeah. So I don't know. We'll see. But I agree. I don't think it's like I don't think it's total doom and gloom. I think there'll be some shit in the history. Technology always makes more jobs. Like there could be a shift in where it goes. Like some industries go away and other ones rise up. Speaker 3 So that could be tricky but uh there are an infinite number of things that need to be done and need to be fixed and need to be made better we're not working two days a week so much software Speaker 1 Is bad like that's the thing it's all bad all software developers will just be able to fix a lot of the bad i hope so yeah like just make something good yeah is it dax that's always tweeting Speaker 2 Like if the ai is so good why is none of the software i'm using getting any better like that sounds exactly like that he didn't say it he should have yeah that sounds like it's true right Speaker 1 Like it is true in the real world like if you get out if you just take one step back from bleeding edge where we all want to be like oh you're in linear and it's all magical and amazing you're In laravel cloud it's beautiful it's awesome if you just take one step back from that it's like oh every other app you interact with is total trash all day long like your doctor's office App is trash right like that's all trash it's all te... ([Time 0:46:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a6288c8e-5fbb-4ccf-a63f-46aaa91af324)) - **AI Success Depends on Verifiability** - AI's impact varies by industry; its success in coding is due to verifiable outputs and large training datasets. - Fields like law face challenges leveraging AI because correctness is subtle and consequences of errors are high. Transcript: Speaker 2 So yeah i don't know yeah i just saw that like i just saw the other day bill gates predicted a two-day work week within the next decade for most people next decade that seems like so incredibly Speaker 1 Far-fetched to me yeah so far-fetched no way i mean it's just not even like society would have to change dramatically to even allow such a thing first of all but like even putting that Aside yeah just most people's job like i don't know has ai unlocked a two-day work week for anyone and on the entire planet thus far? Speaker 2 I don't think so. I kind of think no. Speaker 1 No. And with the economics, I mean, I just feel like, okay, in an industry where it creates huge efficiencies, I mean, if it goes traditional tech, it's just going to actually make more jobs In that industry, but not necessarily like less work. Or if it does go the route of replacing, then it's not going to be like everybody has two hour two day work week it's going to be like well there's 20 of the people working five days a week Like they always were but there's just 80 less of them or whatever than there were before but everybody working two hours at the same or two days the same salary i don't know that's never Speaker 3 Going to happen i feel like people are already only working you know 40 of their time when they're at work so they're not gonna give them three days off no way people uh people get nervous Speaker 2 About this i had someone dm me not too long ago and they were like i'm really depressed i'm on like anxiety medication because i think the ai is gonna like destroy my career that i worked So hard on i was like I don't know. I don't know what to say. I was just like, I said something like, do you, do you pay for any AI generated app now? Like, have you even seen a good AI generated app once? No. The most impressive thing is that Peter Level's flying game so far. No, I don't. So I don't know. Speaker 1 I love, I use AI every day, but obviously it's just still such a long way to go. Yeah, it's a useful ([Time 0:49:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0c21c468-6a11-45a1-ae25-4a6b8952e936)) - **Choose Ideas With Broad Appeal** - Indie hackers should step back and critically assess if their ideas are good instead of blaming marketing or followers. - Focus on identifying problems many people face, not just niche personal issues, for better startup ideas. Transcript: Speaker 2 Key that's what every most people's ideas are bad that's the whole problem all right so how do indie hackers have better ideas taylor tell us okay so i think one thing i see a lot i this doesn't Tell you i think how to have better ideas, but it just helps people fix something that they do wrong a lot. A lot of people have this string of things not working out. And they launch something, it doesn't work out. They launch something again, it doesn't take off. And they do that. Let's say they do that six or seven times. And they never seem to step back and say, I'm not good at having ideas. All of my ideas are bad. And how do I like step back and fix that? They always blame it on like some other ancillary thing of like, oh, I didn't like market it right. Or like the, you know, I didn't, the design wasn't good maybe, but like- I don't have enough followers on Twitter. Speaker 3 Yeah. Speaker 2 Like I don't, I'm not Peter levels. I don't have, you know, hundreds of thousands of followers, just like good ideas are almost always successful i think most of the time they just always take off to some extent but uh you Know people just never seem to step back and say okay like i'm i'm missing the mark or like the what i think is a good idea is not what most people think is a good idea. Like how do I correct that or fix that? I don't know. That's kind of like a brutal thing to like step back and accept, you know. Usually what I see is the ideas are usually too niche. They're like something, you know, that just not anyone really has besides this person, which feels weird for me to say because I've always been the guy that's like scratch your own itch. Just solve your own problems. Well, not hard, you know? But yeah, I don't know. Just like identifying problems that a lot of people have. But, you know, easier said than done, I guess. Obviously, everyone would love to do that. But a lot of the low hanging fruit has been done i mean to be fair um a hard part you know a lot of the easy low-hanging fruit has been solved on the internet um and i think that the really successful Ideas are hard and they like require outside the box thinking uh even though like it's like coding is getting easier it's never been easier to build things but there's like it's harder Speaker 1 To like get the right ideas, I think. I do think there is this other crazy opportunity on the like bootstrapper indie hacker front right now, which is like when you're trying like five years ago, when you're trying to have An idea, it's like, yeah, a lot of low hang fruit's been done. And usually the best way my what I've always told people is like you want to basically build something that already exists in a sense i think people want help desk software so you should Build some more help desk software right because like you know people want that that's at least you're not like trying to invent a whole new market that nobody even you don't even know If anybody wants it right okay but everything was mature it's like how do you break in there's lots of good options ([Time 0:55:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f8ce9aa4-7823-48a1-b2ef-a266d40037ba)) - **Build Tools Users Need Daily** - Build productivity or aspirational tools that users rely on daily to ensure product stickiness and reduce cancellation. - Tools used all day create value that users hesitate to abandon, fostering long-term engagement. Transcript: Speaker 2 A distribution distribution yeah ads whatever it is but yeah there's a certain category of existing markets that i am always like drawn to like customer support is a good example but Also tools like linear or like base camp where i find like those kinds of tools like really prey on people's desire to like get their life together uh aspirational tool yeah like if i if I just sign up for linear or this organizational tool or this support software finally like everything's gonna click and like the comp we're gonna be organized we're gonna be getting Shit done constantly. Like customers are going to be happy. I love those kind of tools. Like if I if there's like another half to my career, I've got to build like productivity software and capture that like aspirational second brain software. Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And those are kind of tools, too. I mean, I tend to like those kind of tools, obviously, as well, it's also like people use them all day, which I think is super useful. Like that's always another thing. If you're not building a tool that somebody is going to use all day, it's like, man, that's so easy to pass on that. So easy to cancel it. Like, it's not easy to cancel a thing that like your 10 staff use eight hours a day, five days a week. Like, it's just hard. Like it's a whole process. You got to get a committee. You got to talk that they got try stuff like people are gonna be mad you're even moving because they know how to use ([Time 0:59:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7e3a27e7-bf4f-4654-b9a0-0f8cf7e8e27f)) - **Building a Kids’ Climbing Wall** - Aaron built an 8-foot climbing wall for his kids over a weekend to direct their climbing energy safely. - The kids now eagerly use the wall, helping build confidence while exploring climbing challenges. Transcript: Speaker 1 I don't know if Taylor has a rock wall. A climbing wall? What do you mean? I don't know. I think he means a climbing wall, but I'm not sure. Speaker 3 Well, Ian, I posted on X.com the everything app, but you probably didn't see it. I didn't see it. What's going on? I built a climbing wall for the kids. Shit, you built one. It's done. It's dusted. It's on the wall. Wow. So I noticed in the house. Okay. My, uh, so my oldest are almost four and I noticed my son was starting to like climb on shelves and stuff. And so like in their room, in their closet, they've got this set of built-in shelves and they like to go and like play in the closet. And one time I opened the door and he was on the top shelf hiding, like in the shelf. I'm like, okay. I love the energy, but we got to direct it somewhere profitable, you know? So I ordered just like a set of rocks, climbing rocks on Amazon and then went to Home Depot and got two little sheets of MDF because MDF is really smooth and I didn't want them climbing barefoot On plywood or OSB or anything. And then I had them help me build this climbing wall, and we got it done in start to finish in one weekend, two solid work sessions, one Saturday, one Sunday. It was fun for me about 75%, and then the last 25, I'm just sweating and furious. I'm like, Oh yeah, hang on. We're almost done kids. Hang on. Um, but then we got it on the wall and they love it. They woke up this morning. I went and woke them up and my son who doesn't yet speak, unfortunately was signing a climb. And I was like, Oh, you want to go climb on our rock wall? And he was like, yeah. And I said, well, you know you got to go to school which that sucks but after school you can climb on the rock wall and so they did it you know they did it last night before bed and they woke Up wanting to do it again and I think it's going to be really great for building his confidence because he like would climb up and then get really scared and you know we're there like supporting Him and helping him get down and each time he got a little bit a little bit better but still a little bit scared my daughter's just like up and down up and down um so i think it's gonna be a great Thing but we did a project and we got it completely finished how about that i love a project with the kids is it eight foot uh just shy of because of the trim yeah so it's an eight foot eight Foot uh wall but yeah so you don't have you have no basement so is this like no don't rub it i have no basement oh man so where the heck is this thing uh we have a so we have three rooms upstairs Big kids little kids and playroom this is in the playroom okay oh perfect i love a kid project that's awesome yeah and it looks good i'm very i'm very pleased with how it went you guys have Any house modifications taylor for the kids like specific he's asking gpt about modern outdoor furniture or whatever sounds like it might be for him though i don't know we really we Speaker 2 Really don't i mean we used to used to build like a little reading nook or whatever when the kids were smaller but now uh not really no kids specific modifications these days you know james Been out fishing every day and victoria's been riding her bike ([Time 1:10:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5eb3ad14-c6c4-4eca-be9e-7e163c5d585c))