Slightly Caffeinated

TJ Miller (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the slightly caffeinated podcast. I'm TJ Miller. So Chris, what's new in your world, man?

Chris Gmyr (00:05)
and I'm Chris Gmyr

Yeah, lots of exciting things that we'll get into this episode, but great things at work. Took her in with a bunch of side projects. And yeah, doing some scout family things here and there. Went to a hockey game the other night with my cousin that came into town.

Science Olympiad with my son this weekend. So that'll be like an all day affair. But he's doing a couple of events with some friends there. So yeah, feel like all over the place. And it's also getting warmer. So that means more house and outdoor and yard projects and all the things with that. So yeah, just trying to keep it together, you know?

TJ Miller (00:39)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I hear that. I, I too have Science Olympiad this weekend, with, with my son. it's their competition. They, I am not expecting them to do well. but, and it's not, it's not for his coaches sake, he's got an amazing coach, but like, they didn't even start sign up until, you know, months after all the other schools started. So we, we just, we didn't have.

enough time to get really prepared. And the person, like the teacher leading it this year, just like doesn't really know what she's doing. And so we also have been short on supplies and just no one understanding how the competition is actually going to work out. So they're they're heading in like kind of blind and months behind on prep. So I

I'm not expecting him to do great, but he's had a lot of fun with it. So that's all that really matters.

Chris Gmyr (01:36)
Yeah, yeah, totally. And because ⁓ our son is in fourth grade, like, I don't know, they've had so many kids sign up for it that they had to do different groups. So it's not like they're meeting every week. They're like once every three to four weeks or something like that. So they can rotate. So like, I don't even feel like they've had enough time to practice or really like get down on what they're needed to do. But again, they're just going to have fun. They're just, you know, experience it and then

TJ Miller (01:59)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (02:04)
⁓ Maybe they'll make improvements next time.

TJ Miller (02:07)
Yeah, and I guess what kind of is like a bummer too is like the elementary school Science Olympiad was like, it's a huge party. Like it just it's it's like this huge party. It's all the event. There's like things going on, other activities to do all day long. And I guess this is like not the case now that he's into the like middle school, high school stuff that it's like it's way more formal and like.

Chris Gmyr (02:26)
Yeah, a little bit more serious.

TJ Miller (02:32)
It's not too far from the house. So like he's gotten his vent in the morning and then we'll come back home and hang out and then go back for awards later. But. Yeah, I forgot y'all were doing Science Olympian too. Yep.

Chris Gmyr (02:44)
Yeah, I will see

how it goes. So good luck to you and your son this weekend. Hopefully everyone has a good time.

TJ Miller (02:48)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's all we can ask for, right?

Chris Gmyr (02:52)
Yep, totally.

So yeah, what's new with you?

TJ Miller (02:57)
yeah, lots of stuff, that we'll touch on this episode too. but just kind of, I've taken, kind of like a week vacation this week and like spent a lot of like downtime with my wife, like, ⁓ lots of little house projects, just kind of trying to get caught up on different things. but really just kind of taken a week to like, just kick back and.

recover from the chaos of the last few weeks. And, um, I've done some catch up on prism. Like I'm, I'm down from like 25 or more PRs down to like 17. Um, and that's been kind of rolling. There's been like new PRs rolling in. I'm trying to stay on top of them. I'm trying to get to like the bigger ones. Like I talked about last episode, the, the providers, I think there's one provider I'm going to like not do.

Chris Gmyr (03:43)
Yep.

TJ Miller (03:50)
There's another provider that like

added a Google auth package and like that's why I broke out bedrock was because it needed the AWS auth package. So I don't know what I'm gonna do about that. I just noticed another provider I'm gonna probably pass on.

But overall, there's been some really cool PRs coming in that I've been able to start getting around to and having Claude do at least a first pass PR review on stuff now. I don't have the action configured or anything yet on the repo. But just hopping into Claude code, checking out the PR locally, and then having Claude just giving it a link, it'll use the GitHub command.

line tool and, uh, you know, it just, it, it does the first pass PR review, which I found super valuable, especially trying to like get through these PRs. It'll point out like most of the stuff that I'm looking for too, and then give me some like clear action items. And honestly, most of the time I won't even go back to the PR with the review. I'll just have Claude make the changes and then I'll just update the PR and then we'll merge it from there. Uh,

which is like easy enough. And then that gives me a little bit more control over like just making sure that I don't want to deal with the back and forth as much. and that's, it's just easier to have cloud code just move forward with the plan. It's like, Hey, I found this stuff. I'm like, all right, we'll just go fix it. Like we're here might as well do it. ⁓ So just catching up on Prism. Then I've got a couple users on Iris.

Chris Gmyr (05:25)
Yep, exactly.

TJ Miller (05:34)
that have had a ton of like feedback and are using it a whole bunch and in different ways, which is, I, I love that. I just, I was so interested to see how other people would use Iris. And so I've been just doing, dealing with like feedback and like, found a couple of bugs we fixed and just making some improvements and like still adding a couple of features here and there. So I did a, I did a live stream.

I don't even remember when I did it. I did a live stream, think, in between recordings. Maybe it was before last recording. I don't even know. But I did go over a bunch of Iris features that I haven't talked about yet that are out. And so that video is up on YouTube and Twitter and everything. So trying to get a little bit to that. But yeah, just a mix of like...

downtime and still a little busy, like mostly just taking a break and picking away at things.

Chris Gmyr (06:24)
Yeah, that's awesome. Any new coffee recently?

TJ Miller (06:28)
no, man. No, I'm super boring. Super boring. I'm still just, I'm drinking the same stuff I've been drinking. I've been staring at this bag of Costco whole bean and I think I'm going to put it in my like emergency dry good storage and just continue drinking what I've been drinking.

Chris Gmyr (06:32)
Same. ⁓

TJ Miller (06:49)
because I don't know how good it's gonna be and it's a big bag. And so I think I'd rather like put it in my like emergency dry good storage and just stay away from it. Cause I don't wanna get into a really big bag of bad coffee and I fear it's really bad.

Chris Gmyr (07:05)
So it's the emergency storage thing.

TJ Miller (07:09)
Oh, we just have like, uh, dry good emergency storage. Like we've got some like five gallon buckets. We've got one that's like full of vacuum sealed rice. Um, we've got, we bought a freeze dryer. Uh, my wife got a freeze dryer, um, a year or two ago and we like freeze dried a bunch of vegetables. We've got those all like vacuum sealed and in a couple of buckets. just like, just some like emergency dry goods in case.

anything happens. Like it's very store like good storable stretchable stuff, you know. And as much as the freeze dryer has been useful for doing like vegetables, which would work out great in like soups, right? You make a soup and you drop in some like freeze dried vegetables. It's great. And they're also so like nice to snack on to sometimes. But we've used the freeze dryer mostly for candy. I'm not gonna lie. Like

Chris Gmyr (08:01)
Yeah, that's

a good use case for it.

TJ Miller (08:04)
freeze-dried skittles are like freeze-dried sour skittles are so good. One of my favorites are the nerd gummy clusters. Doing those are delicious.

Chris Gmyr (08:15)
I'd

love to get a freeze dryer, but my wife is, I already have a lot of food and kitchen and grilling and smoking and all the gadgets already. She's like, I'm allowing another huge like appliance like in the kitchen or wherever. It's like, yeah, once we, I don't know, if we ever redo the kitchen and it's like, I have to plan for like all these things that I want like ⁓ a, you know, coffee in it.

TJ Miller (08:23)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (08:40)
cabinet or area and all these little appliances or some smarter storage for them. Because I don't know, you don't use the mixer every day or a freeze dryer every day. So if you can find better storage solutions for that. But that's a future project. I wonder if you can rent them. I if I could rent one for a weekend or a week or something. That'd be cool.

TJ Miller (09:03)
Yeah, get one for a week and then just like knock out a bunch of stuff. Like, cause ours, it sits most of the time. Like we'll get into like batches where we'll do like a big batch of like candy or like we'll do like a big batch and we'll do like maybe a couple, like a few batches in a row. And then we just like ends up sitting and then it takes up a big corner of our kitchen. So like it's same, same deal.

Chris Gmyr (09:29)
Too

bad it's a big appliance. I had to pay for shipping and you guys can ship it to me and I ship it back to you. Couple weeks, but probably won't want to do that. I wonder, like, have you tried freeze drying, like cold brew concentrate? I if you could do that and then just add water or something.

TJ Miller (09:36)
Yeah, right, jeez.

I don't even know how to do liquids.

I've only done solids.

Huh.

Chris Gmyr (09:51)
Maybe I'm thinking of something else. Maybe it's a dehydrator. Maybe that would be different. Yeah, I don't know. be fun to try.

TJ Miller (09:57)
Yeah.

Yeah, for sure, man. So, yeah, just we just have like generic dry good storage. We normally have some like coffee in there, but I'll cycle that out more than anything else. Just to kind of like keep fresher beans in there. I think that's going to go in like storage, though. I'm just staring at it. I'm like, this does not look or sound good.

Chris Gmyr (10:15)
Yeah.

TJ Miller (10:18)
Yeah, we're going to hold on to this one for emergency cases only.

Chris Gmyr (10:21)
Yep, good call. Sweet. So yeah, basically the same thing for me. Just enjoying the iced espresso that I mentioned last week. So if you haven't checked that out yet, I would highly recommend it. But yeah, just chunking down the same stuff, same process. So nothing too crazy or special. might go to a coffee shop tomorrow. We'll see how it goes. But I might have something to report back next week. But yeah.

TJ Miller (10:31)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nice.

Chris Gmyr (10:50)
Boring as well. Yeah, so why don't you jump into some recent changes for your effect.

TJ Miller (10:52)
Yeah, it gets like that.

Yeah,

yeah. So if you've been around on...

Twitter or LinkedIn, you maybe saw my post that I was looking for my next adventure and I found my next adventure. I will be on Monday starting with Luma Brighter Learning. They're a ⁓ learning and compliance platform and they've got a whole bunch of really cool AI initiatives that they want to work on.

and it'll be working with Laravel and PHP, which I love. So I'm like super looking forward to that. I just got my laptop in yesterday, so excited about that start. And so that's kind of why I took the week to just kind of like step away from the chaos of like looking for my next home and.

Like starting the next thing, like it just, it like my wife had spring break this week too. And so it just seemed like a good week to like take some downtime, like kind of like we talked about in the last episode of like, just like making room for downtime and taking space away from things. so it was just like, it's been a really chill week getting like prepped for the transition. but yeah, so I found, ⁓ found a new adventure to work with.

Chris Gmyr (12:19)
Yeah, that's awesome. Sounds like a good fit. also with PHP, Laravel, all the AI stuff sounding like that they want to do. So yeah, that's a great fit. And it's also nice that you had a little bit of time off in between instead of just jumping right into the new gig. So that's awesome. Grants.

TJ Miller (12:20)
So yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

thank you, man. I really debated on to take a week or not take a week and then really also noticing my wife had spring break this week, so she was off of school and everything. That just seemed to make a ton of sense. I did things like deep cleaned my office so I can have a fresh space for fresh start.

And just like kind of picking away on some like home projects, making sure like everything's like caught up on so that I don't have, you know, many distractions or pulls around the house so I can, you know, get settled into a new gig, which is always, it's always, it's fun, but it's a challenge, you know, getting ramped up and onboarded and learning new architectures and new patterns and.

you know, new domain knowledge, because this is like, even though I'm very experienced with PHP and Laravel, like, I'm not, like, this is like new domain knowledge for me. So it'll be a lot of like learning the space and the industry a bit too, which is, don't know, I'm looking forward to it. It's like being in a space that is encouraging learning. And I love learning. I'm very passionate about it, like actually. So...

There's, there's, think a lot of alignment in what they're trying to do and like just other psychological interests that I've had. You know, I've got, I've got ADHD and like, my mom was a special ed teacher and she used to like take me out of school to go to like ADHD conferences with her and stuff. So there's just this like, I've learned to think about learning in a different way. And.

I'm excited to be somewhere where like the CEO is like a got a PhD in like learning science. Like, this is like, yeah, like this is going to be like a really interesting. I think there's just going to be so much that I get to learn that I'll find interesting. So very exciting.

Chris Gmyr (14:28)
school. Yeah.

Yeah, that's awesome. And it's great that it aligns with what you're interested in, your values, background, things like that. And it's a completely new space that you can learn a whole bunch of stuff at. So I think that's super cool. And that's something that I've tried to dial in on the last couple of job changes for different reasons. It's just I want to be a part of something that can better.

TJ Miller (14:52)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Gmyr (15:04)
the world and like other people. And like I thought of like my ability to like code and program, think critically about like all these things and systems is like my superpower. So like I'd rather use that superpower for good and like benefit like as many people as possible. Because there's like, you know, tons of jobs and companies out there and like I've worked for them.

TJ Miller (15:06)
Mm-hmm.

Sure.

Chris Gmyr (15:28)
like earlier on of like, well, you just kind of need a job or you just wanted to try something, you know, a little bit new, but you get into it and it's like, this doesn't feel super great. And I don't like the business strategy or like how they make money. And it's like, ⁓ okay, got to transition to something else that makes me feel better on a day to day basis.

TJ Miller (15:48)
Mm-hmm. Yo, for sure. And I think there's, I don't know, there's just, it's, it's, it's a really interesting opportunity and I get to work with, like I said, Laravel and Prism and Laravel AI. Like that's what I get to work on. I'm like, that's, that's my like initiatives is to like work on that stuff. So, um, that's really exciting for me to like be able to get in and do that. Um.

But I've heard that you've also had some job shifts as well, right?

Chris Gmyr (16:21)
Yes, yes. And I just put that on Twitter yesterday. But yeah, as we've talked about here, like I've been working on a bunch of like dev-x and AI stuff kind of as side projects at work, just doing like, you know, anywhere between like 20 to 50 % time on the side of my regular, you know, team and staff engineer like responsibilities. And that has been noticed by a bunch of people there.

And they offered me a position to go into a full dev-axe platform role. So that's super exciting. It leaves opportunities for the people left on my team without a staff engineer to possibly level up into that position, which is great for them. And then it gives me more time and ability to work on all these other things that I've wanted to do or had plans to do or haven't had the resources.

TJ Miller (16:56)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Gmyr (17:13)
to do yet. So there's still a lot of ⁓ unknowns with it. Eventually we're going to be hiring more people, either internally or externally, to fill some more seats in that team with me. But I'm basically the founding member, like staff eng, for this new team. And we're doing a bunch of kickoffs this week to talk about roadmaps and ideas and all the things to get a prioritized list of what we can knock out pretty quickly.

before more management or whatever comes in where we can go fast right now and knock out a bunch of things and balance between what are some quick daily paper cuts that I can keep on improving on and then what are some longer term projects and bigger initiatives that I can keep chunking away on the background. So yeah, lots of cool stuff coming from that. yeah, super cool opportunity. So I'm excited for it.

TJ Miller (18:05)
Dude, that's so exciting. That is such an interesting space to be working in. I know you've been working a lot in there. then outside of work, I know you've been working on some really cool stuff as well. so I think it's.

really neat that you're able to like kind of bridge that gap and really hit that intersection of like things you're interested at and like excelling at right now and being able to like be at that like that crossroad of like interest and passion and what you do on a day to day basis. So it's just such an exciting opportunity.

Chris Gmyr (18:36)
Yeah, for sure. And I feel like I'd be able to talk about like a lot more of those projects, or at least more of those projects compared to some of the projects of like the other team, because it's like more sensitive and patient provider type of thing. But these are just like engineering tools. And like there will hopefully be a lot of things that I can share that's like, you know, more kosher, you know, to do in a podcast or blog or, you know, social.

TJ Miller (18:51)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Chris Gmyr (19:04)
type setting. yeah, looking to post like a lot more of like what I'm learning coming across tips and tricks, things like that so that we can talk here. So looking forward to kind of the opening up the floodgates of the content publishing.

TJ Miller (19:12)
Yeah.

Dude, that is so exciting to hear. Yeah. I think it's just a ton of opportunities to learn and create some really cool stuff. And then, yeah, like I think there's tons of opportunity for content in there. great time for you to have like a redone your blog also, you know, right? Just in, just in time to have a bunch of stuff to talk about.

Chris Gmyr (19:36)
Yep, yep, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, so hopefully be leveraging that a whole bunch. And then, yeah, I've just been like tinkering that on the side. So you can definitely talk about those improvements if we want to.

TJ Miller (19:50)
Yeah, dude, that's sick.

Awesome, man. Well, I think we can like next thing on our like topic lists are just like maybe going through some like Iris and Prism updates. I don't have anything like super duper crazy. I did. I have been like prepping for a new release. We've got some new providers we just added. I think we just added. Let go through some of these real quick. We just added like the Z.ai.

provider, we added perplexity. Finally. that one's been, we've had that one, that PR has been sitting for a long time. And so, just.

Like I said last episode, reviewing providers is like kind of a pain because I really want to test them out. These I just kind of like, I looked through the test suite, the test suite looks solid. They're generating fixtures. I kind of just went ahead with these because I didn't feel like signing up for them, honestly. But one of the cool things was, is there was something wrong in one of them. There already was a PR to fix that. like community's super on top of it. So we've had like

Chris Gmyr (20:46)
you

Nice.

TJ Miller (20:57)
some bug fixes and stuff inside of there, but just really trying to like also this week in a as much as I can get through some of these PRs and just kind of get the repo ready for me to be able to like focus on work for a little bit and kind of take a small break from Prism. You know, I want to find a I want to find a healthy balance of rhythm to all of it. And so

One of the things I want to do is like start getting back to the gym. And so like maybe if I'm up early enough, right, like my son gets to school super early in the morning, you know, I can just go from there straight to the gym. And if I can do that, come home, you know, like shower, review a couple of PRs and then start my day. Like that would be, I think, a really nice workflow to like help me also stay on top of things in Prism, but then kind of have, you know.

my day to spend focused on work and everything there. ⁓ So like I said, with Iris, ⁓ I did ⁓ kind of an update livestream. I just went through a ton of the new features. We got stuff for, I added support for citations. So when Anthropic does web search, it will render all the citations and what it referenced out of those different sources. What else have we done?

Chris Gmyr (21:49)
Mm-hmm.

TJ Miller (22:10)
I added provider support customization. now if you wanted to run... I don't know, did I talk about these in the last episode too? Stop me if I have. I added provider support so you can now basically run everything on OlaMa if you wanted to, which is pretty dope if you wanted just a completely offline version. I tried it out. It worked really pretty well. I actually...

I mostly just ran into a bottleneck of overloading Olamo with requests and then they just get long and the bigger the context window, it's harder to handle. So I would have had to tune everything way down, which you can definitely do through customization, but it's kind of a pain. So I didn't tune anything down too far. And then I completely rewrote.

agent, leg, and task delegation. there's a tool that there's like tools in place that Iris can like delegate a task off to an agent and the agent will go work on it in the background. It will web socket a message back into the chat stream when it's done. There's also like a live UI for watching the agent do its background tasks. But I switched that from being a queued job.

over to a like a like a daemon running. So like there's a new artisan task that you run in the background as a PHP artisan iris colon agent. And you run that it's a continuous running task. So it'd be something you run with like supervisor or something along those lines. And it's now just like a

new process you run and like that's where the deferred test run instead. I was running into like weird timeouts like trying to like cascade timeouts between the job and horizon and the there some of these agent tests are just like long running things and you know long running jobs are

kind of a pain, they're just like kind of a hassle to deal with, especially if you need to like gracefully shut down Horizon or something. You're now waiting your like maximum time out for jobs to make sure like jobs complete and everything before you shut down those containers or whatever. So I don't know, it just, it got to be a lot. And so the Daemons got like graceful shutdowns built into it and everything and...

I don't know, it just seems to be working a lot better. It's not a feature I use a ton of. So it was just like, it's one of those features I threw out there for other people to try out and like for me to explore how other people use it. So we'll see as I get more feedback and more people try out Iris and, you know, try out the test delegation. We'll see if it like makes it out of beta or not. Since I don't really use it, you know.

Chris Gmyr (24:50)
Yeah, you made a whole blog post about it too,

TJ Miller (24:53)
I did,

haven't, I just realized I haven't shared that out. ⁓ But yeah, there is a blog post I wrote about it on my website. Thank you for reminding me. Yeah, we'll drop that in the show notes, but yeah, yeah, I wrote a blog post about kind of some of the decisions behind it and what the new process looks like. And there's like all the docs and everything on it, on Iris's website.

Chris Gmyr (25:01)
You're welcome.

Nice, yeah, I'll drop that in the show notes, but yeah, that's good improvements for IRS. And I guess that is a good transition into like one of the other topics that has been kind of on my mind related to possibly like IRS is that like I use Claude projects a whole bunch and usually they stay like pretty well within like those buckets. So Claude, you know, can't reach out into like other projects, right?

It's just it can only reach out to its own project and you can like add an additional context for the whole project or for certain chats, but it can't reach from project one to project two. So what I've had happen is like I'm discussing like AI improvements or like API improvements or the new DevEx team and ideas and crunching information over there.

So I have like three to five different projects like all over the place. But there's a lot of crossover in those. like I have been like having a hard time of like getting the right context or enough context in some of these projects without like merging everything together in, I don't know, like a work project or something like that. Because like, I don't know, I still want some separation between some of the boundaries, but other times,

I need it like kind of full open. So I'm like, well, do I just drop projects and like, I don't know, construct something locally with like markdown files or like, can I leverage something like Iris? Cause I have it set up locally and I've been like looking through it, but I haven't pulled the trigger on it because I use the mobile app a bunch, like especially when I'm like, I don't know, at lunch, like thinking about things or like putting

my daughter down at night when I'm just waiting for her to fall asleep, like I'll just throw some ideas in there and be like, these are just ideas, let's not do anything with them, let's talk about them tomorrow type of thing. So it needs to be like cross device, I don't know, cross project, like, I don't know, I don't know what the solution is for that, because like, even though I can use the cloud remote, if something was like an active cloud code session to maybe like,

TJ Miller (27:10)
Yeah.

Chris Gmyr (27:28)
jump into like obsidian on my laptop or something like that. Maybe that would work, but it's kind of clunky and I've had like hit or miss success with the Clav remote. Like I feel like they added some more timeouts in where if it goes like inactive, like you can't really jumpstart it from the app anymore. So it's like little weirdness in there. So I'm like.

TJ Miller (27:48)
man.

Chris Gmyr (27:52)
I don't know. How do I combine all these one-off or potential projects into a cluster of ideas? And maybe that is moving more towards an Obsidian brain, because I've seen that in a couple of blog posts and videos and stuff like that. I the Obsidian CEO put out a bunch of skills for Obsidian, so I wanted to check those out as well.

TJ Miller (28:10)
Yeah.

neat.

Chris Gmyr (28:20)
And since I use Obsidian and it's just Markdown files anyway, I've done some crunching with that. And that's been pretty beneficial recently. yeah, I just don't know. I don't know. There's so many aspects to it. I'm having a hard time of nailing down a solution to it.

TJ Miller (28:34)
Yeah.

Yeah, it seems like.

I mean, have you been chatting with Claude about like what a solution might look like?

Chris Gmyr (28:42)
not really. It's just something that like keeps on crossing my mind, like as I'm like entering into a project of like, well you're answering it this way because you don't have all the knowledge of this other project over here. So I haven't like gone to the next step of like actually ideating or throwing in all my options and like, what, what can we do? cause I, with redoing my website also, I'm like,

do I make this almost like an Aaron Francis life OS of just putting everything in there? So it not only knows about the content, but it could ingest obsidian notes or do a sync to there, vectorize everything. And then it would have everything available to it. But then that's pretty close to what Iris does. And I don't know, too many options. And I don't know, probably just have to dive into and tinker.

with some of this stuff, but.

TJ Miller (29:35)
Yeah, yeah, I mean you could expose it like a tool set to Iris to like interact with different things.

like Iris has access to command line tools. So like it can like run commands on your behalf and things like that too. so there's, there's definitely maybe some interesting options to do inside of Iris, but like, don't know. This is like, these are things that I use AI a lot to like just churn on ideas of like, go back and like pose that to, to Claude. if it's just like, yeah, here's like,

loosely the problem I'm trying to solve and here are like some of the ideas I've thought about so far like help me just like brainstorm and like chew through this and it does a pretty good job like I do that with Iris a whole bunch too just because Iris knows about things so I'll like chew through things and like I like the bass I like a lot of the bass prompting and persona stuff so I just like I'll

feed all of that to Iris and then just kind of like chew through the idea. like sometimes we end up sometimes we end up going really nowhere with it other than just like exploring the idea a little bit more. But sometimes it turns into a PRD and then I feed that over to like Claude and we build we build something new. You know, so that's I don't know something I always like recommend is like doing that ideation process like with with Claude to.

Chris Gmyr (30:49)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. How?

Yeah, yeah, I'm going have to do that because I, yeah, I do that with so many other things. I just haven't pulled the trigger on this actual multi-project issue yet. But also, how in Iris have you handled, I know this was basically one continuous stream and thread. ⁓ How do you talk about multi-threads or multi-

TJ Miller (31:16)
Mm-hmm.

Chris Gmyr (31:23)
conversations at the same time, or do you really need to stay, like, I don't know, single threaded until like, okay, I'm done with this part of the conversation. And then here's this other track of ideation or work or something like that kind of over here.

TJ Miller (31:38)
No, I typically just have like, I know if you think about like you and I have in a DM, like typically we're like one topic at a time, right? Like we're not having like multiple conversations in parallel, you know, about different things. that's, the experience of Iris has been.

Kind of like I would be just DMing a friend, you know, it's typically like one topic at a time. Like sometimes we'll go back and forth, but then like you're liable to confuse Iris as well, kind of like jumping around on topics. like staying single threaded handles topic transitions well, but.

Chris Gmyr (32:08)
Mm-hmm.

TJ Miller (32:15)
you definitely like, I think it would be challenging to have like parallel conversations with Iris. But that's not how you would experience like like a DM with like somebody else. You're typically not, like I've definitely had that happen before where you're like multi-threading conversations with somebody, but typically you're like one topic at a time. So that's kind of the experience with Iris too.

Chris Gmyr (32:36)
Yeah.

Yep. That makes sense. So I feel like when I'm in the headspace of like just having a bunch of ideas or things that I want to work through, like I'll just open up Claude and either dictate or type something in there of like thread idea, whatever process number one, and then, I have this other thought. So while thread number one is chunking, I'll go to a new chat.

either like in a specific project or like just in the regular chat and do like thread two and then throw another one in like thread three and then kind of circle back to thread one because that one is probably done processing and chunking or researching or something like that. So I don't know maybe I have too many things going on at the same time. I need to prioritize a little bit more or something but I don't know I feel like when I get the ideas like you just need to

get it down and out, and then I can read either the response or the research that was done, because sometimes that can take anywhere between 10 minutes and 45 minutes for deeper research. So it's nice to just throw that out into the Claude ether and then come back to it when I have time to review everything. just throw on a whole bunch of ideas and circumstances.

TJ Miller (33:51)
Yeah,

yeah, no, for like deep research and stuff, I kind of reach for like, cloud AI, like the app, and we'll have that do deeper research. I don't typically go to IRS to do that kind of stuff. I did start on that live stream, I think I played around with having, nope, I didn't do that on the live stream, but testing of the new agent stuff. I had the deferred task agent, like go and do research and then complete like a

Markdown document with all the research that it found I was like go find out everything you can about Laravel 13 and Come back and it like cited its sources and came back willing you it searched Laravel news like a bunch of other places so like that that could be interesting use case for like deeper research inside of

Iris and that's kind of why I came up with these deferred tasks where it has access to all the tools that Iris has access to and it's just like this agent that can go off and do its thing on its own uses the CLI and it just dumped the markdown file in my home directory and that worked out fine for me.

So like Iris kind of has things for that, but I still reach for like Claude AI for a lot of stuff to do like maybe like deep research on a topic. but I've, I've also thought about the concept in Iris of like maybe doing like sort of threads where you're still kind of meant to have like one continuous, like main conversation. So I've thought about calling them like side chats or something where like, you can just like have like a short-lived tab to talk about something like very specific. ⁓

and like that's got, you know, its own context window and will still contribute to like memories and all of like that kind of stuff. But to just kind of have these like little like one off side chats on things. I've thought about introducing that, but conceptually, I'm still like trying to figure out exactly what that looks like and if that aligns with kind of what I'm envisioning for Iris or if that's just

Chris Gmyr (35:46)
Yeah, it's a lot.

TJ Miller (35:48)
Yeah. And that would be like a pretty big undertaking too, but.

Chris Gmyr (35:52)
Yeah, yeah, totally. So yeah, I'll tinker with it more. And maybe I'll get enough time to report back next week and do a couple trial runs with things.

TJ Miller (36:02)
I think I like your idea of using an Obsidian Vault for this and being able to just say, each folder is a project. And if you need to cross project domains, just go do it. They're just folders and markdown files.

Chris Gmyr (36:16)
Yeah,

feel like that's probably my best option. And I know in chat, can also have the ability, like, ⁓ Claude updates your project memory automatically. But I wonder if I could move that over locally with Obsidian. And then if we make significant updates to the memory, I'll just copy and paste that back into chat project. So it still takes memory.

And hopefully, I wouldn't need to do that that often. But that could be an option as well. I also asked at some point last week if Claude projects have an API, which it didn't seem like they did, which that's kind of a bummer.

TJ Miller (36:54)
Yeah, I don't think they do.

Chris Gmyr (36:56)
Yeah, so maybe in the future, if they did offer an API for stuff like that, it'd be a lot easier to sync things back and forth and keep things up to date. But just manual for now. Cool.

TJ Miller (37:03)
Yeah.

Yep.

I mean,

yeah, I mean, in this in this climate, man, just have Claude build something for you. Like, just build something like and that's what that's that's something I love so much about the timeframe we're in is like how easy it is to build just hyper specific bespoke software for yourself. Like I just like

Chris Gmyr (37:15)
Yep. Yep.

TJ Miller (37:29)
instead of having to deal with this like generic thing, it'd be like, nope, I just, want this, this one thing to work this very specific way, like just build it. Like, you know, it's exciting times for, for that kind of stuff. So.

Chris Gmyr (37:38)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been building a whole bunch of skills locally recently. So yeah, maybe I'll chat about those next time because then we're getting up on time. ⁓

TJ Miller (37:52)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And

I've got like, I've shipped all my skills and stuff with, with Iris too. So it's been interesting to see people like get exposed to like my, my cloud workflow too, and the skills that I use when I build with Laravel. so yeah, I think, I think definitely we can talk some skills next time and there's plenty to talk about. Cool, man. So on that note, you want to wrap up?

Chris Gmyr (38:14)
Yep. Nice. Yeah,

let's wrap it up.

TJ Miller (38:19)
All right, thank you all so much for listening to the Slightly Caffeinated podcast. Show notes, including all the links and social channels are down below and are available at slightlycaffeinated.fm as well. If you have any questions for us or content suggestions, you can go to the Ask a Question page on our site and we'll feature it on an upcoming episode. If you have, I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Thank you so much for listening to us. We will catch you next week.