What Do You Know? I'm An AI Developer.

November 2023 was less than two short years ago. “Back then”, I produced an audio program for my guys called “Women And AI”. In it, I admitted that AI had arrived, was here to stay, and that for the most part it was probably evil.

I had good reason to think that. After all, the first round of “AI girlfriend” apps had already hit the market. I was convinced at the time--and remain so--that if men turned to robots instead of real women, civilization was pretty much doomed.

Fortunately, as least from this observer’s perspective, it looks like chatbot chicks have kind of fizzled. After all, let’s be realistic (ironically enough). Even real life phone sex with a real woman gets boring after the first couple of times, you know?

And then there were the AI-assisted online profiles and, go figure...AI generated headshot images. It just felt “off” to have AI generate a robotic simulation of whoever we are, presumably to be presented to the robotic simulation of whatever “woman” you just swiped right on. It just came off as an endless loop of inauthenticity.

I don’t think I’m wrong in that assessment. Few have dared to argue otherwise. But here’s the thing...over the past couple of years dating sites and apps have actually flatlined out there. So with or without AI, online profiles and pics themselves are suddenly (and weirdly) almost moot.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT has gotten really good. I would argue Anthropic’s Claude even better. There are way fewer images of people with three arms in recent months. Better advice on handling customer service departments. Cleaner, more error-free steps to making my “barn find” motorcycle run for the first time in 20 years.

So yes, I’ve warmed up to what good AI can bring to the world. That doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned being a healthy skeptic. It’s just that I’m man enough to realize when something’s NOT a fad, and people really do want to hear actors talk.

Fast forward to a few months ago. Someone who I respect wrote in his email newsletter that “if you don’t have a chatbot by this time next year, you’re gonna be out of business. Maybe even six months.”

Now, I fully understand his audience probably has more, say, tech startup guys than dating/relationship coaches. But still, the warning resonated.

As fortune would have it, I had just run a Masterclass For Men where I blatantly told the whole group that you can kinda actually just go to ChatGPT and ask it to answer basic “meet women” questions “in the style of Scot McKay, dating coach for X & Y Communications in San Antonio, TX”.

But then a funny thing happened. I actually “ate my own dog food”, as Cisco Systems used to say about it’s own network infrastructure, and performed the exercise myself.

The results were nothing short of comical. “Yeah man, I’ll tell you what...when you go out on a first meeting with a woman, be sure to be nice and bring her flowers.” It was talking like me, but it was apparently giving advice from some anonymous women’s magazine article from 1998!

It was GAME ON. What I had to do was build my own “Scotbot” that still talked like me, but actually gave guys answers I’d really give. Now THAT would be a solid, positive way to us AI.

But HOW?

As it turned out, virtually NONE of my long-time peers in the men’s dating space who I mastermind with had attempted such a (crazy) venture yet.

But several had heard that ChatGPT could actually build such a thing for me.

Full of youthful exuberance and naive enthusiasm, I took a deep breath and prompted ChatGPT accordingly. In response, and in characteristic form, it told me such an undertaking would be “simple”, and would I like it to build me a punch list of the necessary steps?

Well, hell yeah, I would!

What followed was a casually-delivered recipe for technical overwhelm that made me feel downright useless. I mean, on the surface it read as if it were simple. The problem was I had no idea what “Streamlit”, “Python”, “GitHub” and “LangChain” were.

To me the “MVP” was Lamar Jackson, and a “RAG” was something I wiped off my pickup truck with. A “Flask” without bourbon seemed empty. I felt stupid even trying to find my account dashboard on most of these techie sites I found myself suddenly signed up for.

Nevertheless, one of either my best or worst traits is I love puzzles. Damn the torpedoes (and the Railway), I went for it.

It felt like I was embarking upon the IRL version of Weird Science, and hopefully not Frankenstein.

But whoops...the torpedoes became landmines FAST.

Weirdly, actually gathering all of the newsletters, podcasts, books, blogs, multimedia programs and Masterclasses I’d done over the years and turning them into .txt files was the EASY part. and we were talking over 7200 files there.

Building an “frontend” and “backend” interface that would actually make sense of them, and then present them on a UI (read: “website”) with intelligible formatting? That was something I should have hired a guy to do from the start.

Yet I soldiered forth through the minefield.

I must have heard, “Good catch!” 200 times after reminding ChatGPT that the latest code that didn’t work as expected was actually re-visiting stuff we had allegedly “fixed” an hour ago.

I couldn’t even write that last sentence without it sounding too complicated.

Ultimately, after somewhat masochistically enjoying the whole lurid, tedious process anyway, what do you know? I had an app!

I dubbed it VAMANOS (Virtual Ask Me Anything, Networked Operating System).

Real cool, and all. But unfortunately for me, when I started asking it questions, the alleged AI genius version of myself came back with, “I don’t know.”

More tinkering in Frankenstein’s lab. The “oh, NOW you tell me” moment where I discovered the magic of the “baseline prompt”. The intentional traps I set for it, which it fell right into at first.

Finally, after crazy amounts of testing and impossible patience with AI, the moment came where I finally startled myself.

Talking to VAMANOS was suddenly like talking to me. Eureka! Man, was it creepy.

But it was good. According to my wife Emily, “Wow, you’re even better than yourself.”

It was SO on point, I’ve actually become a bit of a “chatbot snob” when dealing with other websites’ AI assistants. Nice.

Humorously, what actually drove me to finally hire a real AI developer was the apparent impossibility of getting the little “VAMANOS” logo to center on the live webpage. Well, that and uploading the whole enchilada to Amazon Web Services and lighting it up legitimately confounded me.

Either all of that or I was just ready for a break from the “puzzles”.

A day later, everything was LIVE and worked pretty much flawlessly.

With the whole mission finally accomplished, for perhaps the first time in my entire career as a coach, I was actually AHEAD of everyone else in my space.

VAMANOS was released just last week, and everyone who uses it seems THRILLED. But since life in the tech world is never wine in roses, leave it to Google reCAPTCHA to suddenly become the “Revenue Prevention Department” at launch time. I got more than my fair share of angry emails from long-time readers. Fortunately, that got fixed.

But despite the nightmares throughout, I was gratified by how MY app was actually more stable than Google. Ha!

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