Here’s the most compelling benchmark of AI progress: A task that took 60 minutes a year ago now takes 60 seconds.

In January 2024, researcher Geoffrey Litt and I spent an hour coaxing ChatGPT to build a simple app on this podcast. Nearly 12 months later, Steve Krouse and I built the same app with one prompt in less than minute.

Steve is the cofounder and CEO of Val Town, a cloud-based platform for developers to write, share, and deploy code directly in the browser. In this episode, we used Townie, an AI assistant integrated into Val Town, to build an app that would keep track of time on the podcast, take notes, and generate more questions for the guest.

Townie had generated the app even before Steve could finish describing it on the show, a mark of how much AI has evolved over the last year. As the founder of a growing startup, Steve tells me his contrarian take on why he isn’t focused on the needs of the non-technical AI programmer, betting instead on being the platform sophisticated developers turn to for backend infrastructure. He also tells me how he started programming and how it continues to shape his vision for Val Town. Here is a link to the episode transcript. (Disclosure: I’m a small investor in Val Town.)

This is a must-watch for founders building AI-powered developer tools, and anyone interested in the future of programming.

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Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Steve Krouse: https://stevekrouse.com/, @stevekrouse

Val Town: https://www.val.town/

Townie, the AI assistant integrated into Val Town: https://www.val.town/townie/signup?next=%2Ftownie

Pieces on Val Town’s blog about how the team built Townie: How we built Townie—an app that generates fullstack apps, Building a code-writing robot and keeping it happy

The book by Seymour Papert about how programming changes the way you think: Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas