Episode 40: Building Digital Lemonade Stands with AIHosts: Pete and Andy (celebrating the big 4.0 at the beach)Episode 40! Pete launches his first digital lemonade stand with Ambulando—a habit tracker you pay for by the hour (4 sats). They explore what it means to build permissionless micro-businesses in cyberspace, why you should just build something (anything), and how their methodologies keep evolving between planning and iteration. Plus: the architect vs gardener approach, pluggable databases, and why Marginal Gains is going public.Key Moments:[00:57] 40 episodes without missing a week—including Christmas and New Year's Day[02:17] Digital Lemonade Stands: concept from Episode 22 with Gigi about permissionless cyberspace businesses[04:00] Ambulando launched: habit tracker with encryption, stores in cloud but can't see your data[05:20] Pay-per-hour pricing: 4 sats an hour, buy a day/week/21 days—fractions of cents[06:44] The beauty of digital lemonade stands: could be anything, ultra-low barrier to entry[07:26] What do we build? The prioritization question—answer: something, doesn't matter what[09:52] Using Nostr for identity and encryption, Bitcoin for permissionless payments[11:25] Marginal Gains evolution: started as Slack clone, became planning space for Wingman[13:30] The controller plane: task on Kanban has threads, whiteboard, context—then sends to Wingman[16:41] This has evolved dramatically based on how we actually work, not how we planned[17:30] Andy's two-instance approach: coding agent + planning/conversation agent in parallel[20:37] Third space problem: dump ideas in Miro/Obsidian but never look at them again[21:25] Stepping away from rigid documentation—more like tending a garden than following blueprints[23:30] Pendulum swing: from planning everything to live dictation, now back to solid plans[25:20] Claude comes to work drunk sometimes—you adjust your management style accordingly[28:36] Garden vs Architect: George RR Martin's two types of writers (still waiting for Winds of Winter)[33:35] Claude Co-Work concerns: YOLOing it onto your main computer gives it access to everything[36:24] Domain expertise unlock: people with specialized knowledge can now build their own tools[40:51] Recursive boards: every Kanban has a board, every task has a board, boards all the way down[46:59] Most AI is sold on laziness—instant gratification vs engaged iteration[49:53] Your job is to steer it: infinite space of what AI can build, you guide it to what you need[52:14] Friend of the pod invite code coming—special access inside Marginal Gains[53:12] Wingman should read transcripts and create tasks automatically[54:58] Look Marks: tag it anywhere, access it anywhere—not siloed bookmarks[57:00] Coming this year: pluggable databases and storage you control, used in SaaS appsQuote: "It's going to build whatever it wants to build if you just let it do that. But you don't have to let it do that. You can just steer it. You steer it over here, it's just going to build whatever you want to build."

The Good Stuff, with Pete and Andy - Episode 39: The Big Stuff

Hosts: Pete and Andy

Pete accidentally calls it "The Big Stuff" and decides to run with it. They dive into Dumpling Town—a game Pete built with his daughter in 90 minutes that now has an economy, side quests, and soy sauce rivers. Treating agents like humans, building family chat apps to avoid WhatsApp, the new Hal orchestration agent, and reflections on a year of shipping software.

Key Moments:

[01:48] Building Dumpling Town: Animal Crossing meets dumplings.

[03:43] The creative genius of kids: "Why don't kids make all of the games?"

[04:48] Level Up - Touch Don't Look for schools.

[08:44] Starting with Nostr: get logins and authentication for free, no password recovery needed

[09:53] Built a Nostr-based gratitude journal: encrypted, runs in the house, wife can use it too

[11:40] The Nostr database assumption: you don't have to store everything on relays

[12:51] Full encryption in the Slack competitor—can't see database data without the key

[15:05] Treating agents like humans: they're just npubs in the room, add them to groups or don't

[16:10] Andy's approach: "I treat them very much like I treat my humans—mush, mush, do it now"

[16:44] Health graph experiment: building while talking to Claude, using sub-agent for graph construction

[18:32] Interface matters: weird to have deep conversations in the terminal

[19:57] Marginal gains as the pre-planning space for Wingman—natural workflow emerged

[24:07] Health-specific interface: makes sense to have constraints around what agents do

[25:03] Dumpling Town expansion: everyone gets their own town, planes between towns, Olympic Dumpling Island

[26:42] This is invaluable education for young kids—unlimited creativity meets approachable tools

[28:00] Schools could run their own Wingman—teachers should love it

[29:15] Learning from first principles: hand-coding microprocessors in binary teaches abstraction value

[31:00] Should people still learn to code? "What do you mean should? People who want to will"

[32:27] Be the Japanese woodworker, not the IKEA table producer competing with robots

[33:07] Gigi's realization: "Fuck, it's fun again—now I can create, I just think things into the world"

[38:06] Built family chat app: encrypted, data lives in the house, kids can message without WhatsApp

[41:21] The one-shot fallacy: Twitter theatre vs actual building over two weeks

[44:44] The container for AI is the business, not the app—software serves the business

[47:00] Re-win amplification: personalized software that does exactly what you want

[48:52] Family as a business: shared calendar, action lists, silly memes channel, pocket money with wallets

[51:26] Mission accomplished for 2025: developed the muscle for shipping software

[52:32] GitHub tracker shows the progress: scattered commits to daily by end of year

[54:29] The wrong framing: doesn't matter if you can't one-shot—two weeks is still 1000x faster

[56:52] Pay-per-day pricing model: 21 sats a day, buy a week and see how it goes

[59:44] Starter kit idea: preload authentication and payment interface for rapid deployment

[1:00:02] Introducing Hal: named after Hal Finney, orchestrates and manages all running apps

[1:03:12] Level Up: the game workshop name—sounds right, move on

[1:05:07] MCP with Blender: could solve the Dumpling Town sprite problem

[1:07:09] Look Marks: Gigi's app that treats eye emojis as bookmarks—because Nostr is open

[1:08:00] Christmas phone detox: collapsed screen time, more quiet deliberate time

[1:09:41] Raw dogging everything: no music, no podcasts, just silence—harder than expected

# The Good Stuff, with Pete and Andy - Episode 38: The Rise of Vibe Product Manager

**Hosts:** Pete and Andy (New Year's Eve edition at the beach)

Pete reveals he's stopped coding entirely after 12 months of learning—now he just product manages a team of agents. They explore the shift from "vibe coding" to "vibe product management," why Pete built Slack in a day, and the addictive power of tight feedback loops.

Plus: steel-manning the security concerns, why raw dogging agents beats sub-agents, and New Year reflections on why model breakthroughs don't matter anymore.

## Key Moments:

* [02:07] "I learned to code for 12 months. And then I just stopped. It's nuts."

* [02:54] Pete built Slack/Discord in a day: "I shouldn't be able to replace a $20 billion SaaS company in 12 hours"

* [08:10] The addiction: "From nothing to MVP in a day, radically transform it every morning"

* [09:05] Not vibe coding—it's a glorious tool for entrepreneurship and building businesses

* [12:10] Introducing Agora: Slack replacement with integrated Kanban, all Nostr-based and encrypted

* [13:25] Slack's fatal flaw: "Bullshit asynchronous tool because you just lose everything"

* [18:05] Steel-manning the critics: addressing "you'll get hacked" security concerns

* [21:21] Everything encrypted with Nostr keys: "They literally can't steal anything"

* [23:21] Your attack surface: "You're the oil you get out of a peanut—not worth it to hackers"

* [28:03] Raw dogging the base agent—not bothering with sub-agents or elaborate skills

* [31:44] Pete's tried sub-agents many times: "I have always been left wanting"

* [32:33] The breakthrough pattern: specify in 10 minutes, deliver in 5-10 minutes

* [34:15] The 21-minute rule: must complete the loop in 21 minutes or it doesn't work

* [42:04] Mainstream adoption reality: experienced professionals never heard of coding agents

* [47:29] Small business owners are the right audience—different relationship to risk

* [50:09] Small businesses always full of risk: "Your hair is always on fire anyway"

* [51:56] The cottage software developer—1000 true fans model, not billion-user SaaS

* [56:44] Andy's New Year take: bullish on tools, no model breakthrough needed since 3.5

* [57:33] Touch Don't Look success: normal people cross the hurdle in 10 minutes, creativity shines through

**Quote:** "I learned to code for basically like 12 months. And then I just stopped. It's nuts. And I thought, this really is like the way to use these things."