Slightly Caffeinated

TJ Miller (00:00)
Hey, welcome back to the Slightly Caffeinated Podcast. I'm TJ Miller. So Chris, what's new in your world?

Chris Gmyr (00:04)
and I'm Chris Gmyr

Hey TJ so yeah, have my son's spring break this week, so he's been off. He was also sick for most of the week last week, so he's been home a lot. And at least like he and everyone else is feeling better because it kind of ran the gambit. Luckily again, like I didn't come down with anything, so had to have to.

Supplements and continuing to work out and getting in enough sleep Hopefully, you know that has helped over time. It certainly feels like it But took the day off yesterday and hung out with the kids and him so we Went out did like story time at the library for the toddlers and got some Bagels and treats like after that and then took him out. We were supposed to go bowling yesterday

But when we got to the bowling alley, like, I don't know, there was like a tournament or some league going on or something like that. And it was packed. So it's like, OK, well, we can't go bowling today. We'll just hang out in the arcade. And so we like played a bunch of games and won a bunch of tickets and got him a couple of little prizes and trinkets and stuff like that. And then came home, hung out with my daughter, the toddler, and then my son and wife went to the new

TJ Miller (00:55)
Hmm.

Chris Gmyr (01:13)
a Minecraft movie in 3D yesterday and they had a good time doing that. So a good little day off and like he's had a pretty good week despite you know people not feeling 100%. So yeah, that's how it goes sometimes unfortunately. But then I ordered a couple weeks ago a new grill and like griddle combo because my grill is like

TJ Miller (01:25)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (01:36)
pretty old. got it when we first moved down here, probably about 10, almost 11 years ago now. And it's still in really good shape, but I've wanted to griddle for a couple of years now. And seeing all the Blackstone griddling recipes and things that you can make on it, I'm like, man, missing out. And just doing stuff inside in the kitchen is just not ideal, because it just smokes too much, and it just makes a mess everywhere.

TJ Miller (01:46)
Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (02:01)
so like research for a little while and like, don't mind having like a whole bunch of different appliances outside. I think that's kind of cool, but my wife is totally anti more stuff like that. So, research for a while and came up and found this, company called Grilla grills, like a gorilla. and they have one called the primate and it's a combo grill and griddle.

TJ Miller (02:19)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (02:25)
So you basically have one or the other going. So it's a full-size griddle. It's four burners. And then you take the griddle off. And then you put in all the grill accessories. So you put in the little flame tamer dispersion of the flames and the heat. And then you put the grates on top of that. So it turns into a full grill. And then you take those off. You can put the grill grates in the storage.

TJ Miller (02:44)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (02:49)
area down below and then you put the whole griddle on and then you can use that. yeah, she was on board with that and she's like, go do it. And it finally came the other day, put it together the other night and then just seasoned it yesterday. So just itching to get in there and do some cooking, which I will do a lot of this weekend. So pre planned out a couple of griddle and grill recipes. So yeah, that's my kind of big fun.

TJ Miller (02:57)
you

Chris Gmyr (03:14)
update is just doing different type of cooking and grilling outside and hopefully the weather will hold out and eat some good food.

TJ Miller (03:18)
Yeah.

Nice man, that sounds awesome. I saw a picture of you putting it together. That thing looks fantastic.

Chris Gmyr (03:28)
Yeah, it's so cool. It's hearty. It came on a pallet and two huge boxes. And the FedEx guy had this big dolly to get it up into the garage. luckily, you have to be home to sign for it. I'm like, can you just put it in the garage? Because they're supposed to just leave it outside. But usually, the delivery guys are pretty cool. So he's like, yeah, can I put it in the garage for you? Yes, you can, absolutely, because I don't want to deal with this outside. Yeah.

TJ Miller (03:32)
hahahaha

Yeah.

Yeah, please. Please.

Chris Gmyr (03:56)
So we were chatting about grills and cooking and stuff like that, because he has an old Blackstone. I'm like, yeah, you should check it out. And then you can have both. You can swap it back and forth. So yeah, it came together pretty well. It took about two hours. But it just has a lot of parts. wasn't hard or anything like that. But it's solid. Yeah.

TJ Miller (04:04)
Yeah.

Sure. Yeah. Sick.

Yeah, ours, we're, we're due for replacement. To be fair, I don't take great care of ours. So, the fact that it's not doing well is, is on par. but yeah, dude, that's awesome. Like I know you do a ton of grilling too. that's sick, man.

Chris Gmyr (04:31)
Yeah, looking forward to it. So yeah, what's up in your world?

TJ Miller (04:34)
jeez. I feel like I've been plagued with vet visits the last week or so. Yeah, one of our dogs got some sort of like bacterial infection on one of his paws and then found out that my little one potentially just has a like skin disorder. She started losing fur in a few areas and her skin's like super dry and flaky. Like it came out of nowhere to like.

Chris Gmyr (04:40)
man.

TJ Miller (05:03)
We, I started, I think maybe noticed a couple spots before we left on our trip to Chicago. But when we got back, it was very noticeable. So took her to the vet too. And they think it's just like a persistent skin condition, which is like not something curable, but something we'll, we should be able to mitigate, but we'll have to like special shampoo, frequent baths kind of stuff. But luckily she's like 13 pounds. So.

doing frequent baths is like very achievable instead of like, you know, one of our like 60, 70 pound doodles. That's going to be a...

Not so fun.

Chris Gmyr (05:40)
Yeah, at

you can put her up in the sink or something like that, hopefully.

TJ Miller (05:44)
Yeah,

it's not going to be long baths. She'll dry quick, you know, with one of our big doodles. That'd be a mess. So yeah, just doing that, working hard on Prism, got a lot of new ideas brewing, got some big secret plans to start getting moving on. And I've also just started realizing how close PHP Tech is getting. So I've got a workshop and a talk to do there.

better get moving.

Chris Gmyr (06:11)
Yeah,

yeah, it's coming up, but it's got like five, six weeks, something like that before the actual event. So hopefully it won't be too bad.

TJ Miller (06:19)
Now I feel like I've left like just enough time. So gotta let that ADHD last minute stuff kick in and hopefully just cruise right through it.

Chris Gmyr (06:22)
you

Yeah, just pretend it's in like two weeks and then just get it all knocked out. know, sometime. Just mentally ship it.

TJ Miller (06:34)
Yeah, right. I don't know, man. That just gave me like a definite wave of anxiety. So

maybe, maybe not. That hit hard. Yeah, man. That's basically it. We had Science Olympiad. So we normally record on Thursdays. Today's Friday. Had Science Olympiad on Thursdays. So we had practice last night. Took a totally different approach. So.

Normally what we do is we'll get together, gather around my laptop, and just go through Code Academy together, go through the Python course. But what I did a couple of weeks ago, and we talked a little bit about it on the show, is I built a artisan command to generate these study guides for each topic that they need to learn.

Chris Gmyr (07:04)
Hmm.

TJ Miller (07:19)
for Science Olympiad. and like the prompt was something along the lines of like, hey, I've got these like fourth through sixth graders who are doing a Python coding competition. Here's the like, give it all the information I had about the competition and like the topics that they were going to cover and all of that. So it generated, I had it do one study guide per topic that they needed to cover. And I sent them home like a couple of weeks ago, but

I sent them as like a Google Drive link with like two PDFs and nobody's actually done anything with them. So I, uh, I printed them all out and, uh, took them. And that's what we did. This last one was we went through almost all the study guides and went through like the cheat sheet that they can take into the competition with them. like, hopefully.

It wasn't as engaging for them, but hopefully like now they're armed to practice some more at home and we can just like go through these study guides a little bit more and talk about, you know, things where they're lacking. I'm going to send, I think I'm going to send home the Codecademy login information, today too, so that they can like practice in Codecademy at home. So.

Chris Gmyr (08:27)
Yeah.

Getting the topics a little bit better or more in the last couple of weeks.

TJ Miller (08:33)
I don't know, man. No one could focus last night. It was really, uh, it was really nails in a chalkboard trying to get them through like any of the study guides. Uh, at least the computer for them is like engaging. So I, I don't know, man. I will get through the training up to the competition. I, I honestly don't, I don't have hopes for them to do super well at this point. And I don't think it's for a lack of.

instruction. just I don't know how like engaged they are with with the content.

Chris Gmyr (09:08)
Yeah,

it's kind of hard with like three kids too, because what works really well in Scouts for a bunch of the crazy kids is just making games out of it. So we do like relay races or, you know, kind of like stoplight green light type games of like if I say the correct answer or whatever description of whatever I'm talking about, like you go if it's incorrect, then you stop type of thing.

So you can probably do a couple of those with three kids, but it's definitely a lot easier with more. So it's bridging the gap of making it an active game and trying to get a little bit of that nervous or just crazy energy out at the end of the day for them to actually sit down and focus and do some book type work or computer work.

TJ Miller (09:55)
Yeah, and to be fair, I'm

used to teaching adults and teaching kids is just a whole other realm. So I know I'm probably coming off ultra dry with them, but I...

Chris Gmyr (10:00)
Yeah.

TJ Miller (10:07)
I'm invested in them doing well. I'm giving it a good effort. But at the same time, like, I didn't, I was voluntold into doing this. So, like, I only have so much bandwidth.

Chris Gmyr (10:16)
Yeah.

Yep, totally.

TJ Miller (10:22)
It's

a cool man. You want to talk a little coffee before we dive into some other topics?

Chris Gmyr (10:26)
Yeah, for sure. So something I thought would be interesting to talk about is like how has your coffee preference evolved over time?

TJ Miller (10:35)
Yeah, so this is an interesting one for me because I feel like Laurel and I have talked about this somewhat recently. I used to be way snobbier, like way snobbier than I am now. Like I'm to the point where I'm like, it's if it's not burnt.

Chris Gmyr (10:48)
you

TJ Miller (10:52)
I'm typically a happy camper. Like, as long as it's not burnt black coffee. I do get...

I am, like we've talked about a little bit, I am still super snobby if I'm going for a snobby drink or at a coffee shop or something, but for day-to-day coffee, my standards have just plummeted. I just don't care anymore.

Chris Gmyr (11:04)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

TJ Miller (11:17)
I definitely like make sure we have like decent coffee around the house and everything, but, no, my standards, I've, I've let them slip as I've, as time's gone on. How about.

Chris Gmyr (11:27)
Yeah, and I think like

as long as you have decent stuff at home, which you guys do and we do too. It's like it's still better than probably 90 % of the coffee out there that you would get like a cafe or diner or restaurant or you know, something like that. You would expect to have better coffee at like you said, a better coffee shop or when you're ordering something special. But I feel like our at home.

TJ Miller (11:33)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (11:53)
levels and expectations are pretty good in general. to get like overly crazy about it at home, know.

TJ Miller (11:55)
Yeah.

Yeah, I just, I don't know. I really would love to spend the money on like a nice espresso machine. And then I'm sure I get like real nerdy and picky about that. But like, I mean, I guess I just, I am in general, I am way more snooty about like espresso than just plain black coffee. Like plain black coffee I have, I used to be very snobby about and I have become far more tolerant of, you know, just I need the caffeine.

Chris Gmyr (12:27)
Yeah,

yeah, and totally. Yeah, so when I started drinking coffee or I don't know if you can even call it coffee, but started off with like a Keurig back in the day. This was before me and my wife met and I would just add so much junk to it like sugar or creamer or Baileys or you know something like that because I

TJ Miller (12:28)
How about you,

Chris Gmyr (12:52)
work from home. had my own business. I was just doing my own thing. So I'm just like, like I'll have a Bailey's in my coffee at the afternoon or something like that. And it was just like straight up just sugar and junk and whatever. And the coffee itself like wasn't even that good. I don't like Keira giving to this day. if people use it, people like it, that's fine. That's cool. But just not for me anymore. And then my wife.

When we were dating, think she got me a bag of whole bean coffee, a little like blade grinder and our French press. And after that, it was like gateway drug into everything else. shortly after that, it was like, man, I got to get better coffee and better grinder and got like the arrow press and eventually the Chemex and a few other things and just

exploded and was like, wow, this tastes really good. then just over time, just didn't add anything to the coffee. No sweetener, no creamer, no nothing. Just being able to drink it black and basically still do that to this day. So it's definitely noticeable when you go to like a diner or restaurant and they don't have like great coffee. And it's like a little, little bitter, little burnt, but still drink it mostly. But yeah, that's kind of like

quick little coffee evolution over time. basically like all sugar with a little coffee mixed in into like just 100 % coffee. Unless I do like a specialty drink or something like that out and about. But basically like home day to day is just black drip coffee.

TJ Miller (14:25)
Yeah, right on,

Yeah, I'd say at this point, like 99 % of what I'm drinking is just plain black coffee. I used to go out and do more. just, nope, not anymore. I'll just drink my like decent black coffee at home.

Chris Gmyr (14:32)
Yep. Yep.

Yep, cool. So yeah, you got on here Prism Relay. What's up with that?

TJ Miller (14:47)
yeah, this is a fun one, man. I.

I cooked something up over the weekend. like MCP model context protocol has been pretty hype. Like, I don't know. It's I, I, I wasn't super hype about it, but it's been getting a lot of hype. And so I figured it only made sense. Like, so Prism's got the concept of tools and MCP servers while they do

other things, one of their capabilities is like exposing tools for large language models to use. So things like there's an MCP server for GitHub, Todoist, Puppeteer, all sorts of other like vendors, like I think Stripe's got one, Figma's got one. So basically what this does is this allows you to connect things like Cloud Desktop.

to these different pieces of functionality. So you could give Claw Desktop the ability to use the Puppeteer MCP server, which exposes maybe a dozen different functions, one for navigating, one for clicking on elements. And so the large language model can then choose which of these tools to use to do different things to accomplish its task. So I figured it was prime area for Prism, since we already have the concept of tools.

to create like an MCP server client tool. So like a universal tool that you could add to Prism that would allow you to access these MCP servers tools. So the puppeteer example is just like so cool. So you can attach a puppeteer like MCP server to your Prism instance.

using Relay, like Relay is the package that has the MCP client tool in it. So you would just define the MCP server connections in your config file, and then you just reference those with Relay, and then you now have all of those MCP servers tools available to you in Prism. you can, like I structured out, there's a good demo I posted on Twitter thread announcing Relay.

where we create an artisan command and we pass Prism a prompt from user input and we give it, know, puppeteer as an MCP server tool with relay. And then I ask it, you know, create a detailed report on Prism, but I only gave it the URL to my personal website.

My personal website only really mentions Prism and then has a link off to the GitHub repository. So the large language model, you can see it working in the browser. It goes to my website, it goes off to Prism, looks at the repo, and then goes to the documentation website. Can't find the docs there because it tries a random URL. So it goes back to the repository.

and then starts like finds the documentation files in the repository and starts like walking through the different documentation files and then spits out this like detailed report on Prism. It's just like mind blowing, like giving this little artisan command access to like go search the web with Prism and like do whatever it needs to do to like accomplish its task, which was super freaking cool.

And it's got me real inspired to do some other stuff. started off not very excited about MCP stuff. And now I am very excited because it's just such an easy way to expose these like very deep tool sets. It was cool. I, there's, there's a GitHub and MCP server did the same thing. I plugged it into that GitHub chat and I'm like, yeah, tell me like summarize all of the current pull requests.

for Prism and their status. Because there's a couple of them that were mid-conversation on things. So I don't know if they're ready or if we're still talking about stuff. And it just like, was like, yeah, I'll use the GitHub MCP tool and I'll go look at the repository, look at all the pull requests for it. And it summarized everything for me. It's just so rad. And like I said, you can use this stuff with Cloud Desktop too.

Chris Gmyr (18:53)
through.

TJ Miller (18:59)
So very powerful tools that you can use in all sorts of places, but now you can use them in Prism with Relay.

Chris Gmyr (19:05)
That's really sweet. then if you wanted to, for your example, for the pull requests, because I'm sure people can change different tags and statuses. if a conversation diverges and it's like, OK, well, we're not actually ready for review here, we're still in discussion, can these tools update that based on the outcome of the summaries?

But then you have to build in additional functionality to say, we're still discussing this. Make sure the tag is in discussion or something like that and not ready for review.

TJ Miller (19:38)
Yeah, believe so. I haven't used the GitHub MCP server extensively, but it does look like it exposes pretty much all of the API's functionality. So if you can do it with the GitHub API, then I believe you can do it with the MCP tool. So I should be able to ask that agent to like go through, review them and like look at the existing tags for issues and appropriately tag them. I should be able to do that too, which would be great.

Chris Gmyr (20:04)
Yeah, that'd be super cool. Especially if you're handling multiple repos. Because even with the you, have Prism, you have now Prism Relay, and could be expanding into multiple repos, especially if you break out into the different providers having their repos. So having a tool like that to say, give me a summary of all the projects, all the reviews that need to happen.

or give me just a summary of what's happening across my Prism org. That'd be really cool. And you can extrapolate that to, OK, my business and or my engineering team has 100 repos. Tell me about that instead of trying to get that data other ways. So yeah, I think that's a super cool use case.

TJ Miller (20:48)
Yeah, I've got a couple other things. I'm a little hesitant to talk about them, but I'll mention something for whoever listens to the podcast. I am also dreaming up an MCP server framework to release with Prism as well. So this would be a way to, inside of a Laravel app, expose different actions as MCP server tools. At least the...

Like I said, MCP servers do more than just tools, but that would be my initial focus will be to like.

build a framework in which you can expose MCP server actions from your Laravel application. So you can create your own custom MCP servers to interact with. So like I said, there's ones for like Stripe, there's ones for ClickHouse that allow like you to like allow the language models to like query ClickHouse information. You know, if I put together a MCP server framework, you could see things like Laravel Cloud offering an MCP server.

or Nightwatch offering an MCP server, which would be so cool to be able to chat your Nightwatch stats and have it do different analysis with it. I think there's some really cool things that you could do that way. this has also got me inspired to take on a couple other projects with stream support and doing some other things. So there's a whole bunch of cooking for Prism right now.

I'm maybe more inspired than ever to like work on it. Now, the challenge is I got these new and exciting projects that I really want to work on, but I also have a bunch of open PRs and issues on Prism. So it's like, I'm trying to find the balance of like, because like to do relay, I basically abandoned Prism for like three or four days. It didn't even like, didn't touch it, didn't look at it other than what I needed to to like work on relay.

Chris Gmyr (22:34)
Mm-hmm.

TJ Miller (22:36)
And that didn't feel good coming back to it. So I got to try to figure something out how to balance this like new stuff with the existing things. So we'll see. might, one of the things I might do to help with some of the motivation issues is I might do, I might do like a GitHub sponsor tier for access to like upcoming things. like,

If you sponsor at a certain level, then you get access to like whatever this MCP server framework is, like you get access to the repo day one while I'm building it. like you'll have an inside scoop on all that stuff coming out before I like make it public and release it or even talk about it. there's, there's some organizational things I'm kind of cooking onto.

Chris Gmyr (23:18)
Yeah, I think that'll be a really good idea. As long as you don't feel too much pressure to jump into all these different repos, because like you said, if you start introducing a lot of other projects and people are paying for like more of the private kind of temporarily closed sourced projects, but you don't have time to manage all the projects or do all the things that you need to do, it gets little wonky also.

TJ Miller (23:44)
That's why I'm super hesitant to do it. like, there is, there are, there are times where I won't be able to touch the repo for a couple of days, you know, and, I'd feel bad, like people paying for access to stuff and like not necessarily have stuff for them to be accessing for periods of time. Cause I'm not always going to be cooking on new things. There will be a point in time where it's just all of the stuff that's like already out in the open.

So I don't know. I'd like to do that, but I don't know if I'm going to actually pull the trigger on it or not.

Chris Gmyr (24:15)
Yeah, I think maybe Caleb did this for some of his timber closed source stuff. Because he has the video course for Livewire, you got access to the video course and a private repo. I'm not sure if he did that or someone else did that. But once you get down the road a little bit more, offering some sort of ongoing

continuing education or videos or walkthroughs of how to do this or that, or how to implement all these tools in the Prism ecosystem. Maybe that would be a good evergreen content and value to also coincide with any temporary private repos and projects going on at the same time to entice people to pay more or pay for longer because you have all these different options.

things like that going on. So maybe something for later on.

TJ Miller (25:06)
Yeah, I was thinking about doing like, I was also thinking about doing like the tier would have access to like private repos of like projects that I'm like starting on. Like maybe like a weekly office hours call or something to, you know, kind of like bundle up a few things to make it advantageous. There's a hundred percent of Prism course coming at some point.

I think that there are some projects I'd like to build before that to really empower the course too.

We'll see. That's definitely in the works. Relay is out there. I announced it I was like, coming soon. And then ended up just, I was too excited. So I pushed on it the next day. I think I just released it the day after. So was like, yeah, here's the announcement coming soon. And then it's like, and also I got totally called out. I announced it on April 1st and Tom.

Chris Gmyr (26:00)
yeah.

TJ Miller (26:01)
on Twitter was just like, yeah, man, bold strategy, releasing, announcing a product on April Fools. I'm like, yeah, I guess maybe that was a bold strategy, but.

Chris Gmyr (26:11)
That's all right.

It happens. I didn't even realize it was April Fool's until like halfway through the day.

TJ Miller (26:16)
Yeah, me neither. like, I've had my head down, like working on relay. Like, I don't know what day it is.

Chris Gmyr (26:20)
That's funny.

TJ Miller (26:21)
Cool, man. Well, I think we're getting close on time. Do you want to wrap it up for today? Cool, man. I want to thank you all for listening to the Slightly Caffeinated podcast. Show notes, including all the links of things we talked about and social channels will be down below as well as at slightlycaffeinated.fm. Thank you all for listening so much. We'll catch you next week.

Chris Gmyr (26:25)
Yeah, let's wrap it up.

See you.