How Grok Bot designers use AI agents to build personal sites and product prototypes | John Bai & Peng Zheng

John Bai and Peng Zheng are designers on the Grok Bot team at SpaceXAI, where they’re building one of the most talked-about AI products right now. John writes publicly about his design process (his piece “Designing Grok Bot with Grok Bot” has already made the rounds) and shares bot templates with the design community. Peng brings a product-design sensibility to personal tools, and his website doubles as a live demo of what he builds. What you’ll learn: How Peng built a self-updating personal website using Grok Bot as the entire backend pipeline, with no CMS and no Figma fileThe exact check-in bot setup that lets Peng send a photo or a place name and have his portfolio update itself automaticallyHow John’s Figma Bro bot handles production design tasks while he’s at the gymHow John uses voice memos to direct Figma work through an MCP connection without opening his laptopThe “shower thought to prototype” workflow John uses with DevBot to test interaction ideas without first going through a product manager or engineerThe “trash can method” of software developmentHow both designers organize their personal bot ecosystemsWhat John and Peng actually think AI means for the future of design as a craft— Brought to you by: WorkOS https://workos.com/?utm_source=lennys_howiai&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=q22025—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more Vanta https://www.vanta.com/howiai—Automate compliance and simplify security — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introducing John and Peng (02:53) The Grok Bot hype train (04:35) Peng’s self-updating personal website built with Grok Bot (15:12) How AI makes design more accessible (19:35) Website update result (20:13) John’s Figma Bro bot (23:35) Creating marketing materials for the bot marketplace (26:00) DevBot: from shower thoughts to working prototypes (28:48) The trash can method of software development (31:19) Other bots John and Peng are using (39:05) Practical tips for when bots don’t do what you want — Tools referenced: • Grok Bot (xAI): https://x.ai/bot • Figma: https://www.figma.com https://www.figma.com/ • Figma MCP server: https://www.figma.com/mcp-catalog/ • Google Places API: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/places/web-service • Notion: https://www.notion.so https://www.notion.so/ • Swarm (Foursquare): https://www.swarmapp.com https://www.swarmapp.com/ — Other references: • Designing Grok Bot with Grok Bot: https://x.ai/bot/guides/designing-grok-bot-with-grok-bot • Figma Bro bot template (shared by John Bai): https://x.ai/bot/marketplace/bots/figma-bro • From zero coding background to hardware hacker: How Cursor + a Raspberry Pi makes AI fun: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/from-zero-coding-background-to-hardware?utm_source=publication-search — Where to find John and Peng: John Bai on X: https://x.com/johnbai Peng Zheng on X: https://x.com/pengzheng_ — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Claire Vo?

  I use AI to get me off my computer, not on my computer. And so the fact that you were at the gym, got asked to do something, and your disability be like, yep, go for it, get it done, and finish your workout, it's like a much nicer way to work.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  I was able to just screenshot in Figma, these two separate art boards of work that was already in progress. And doing so, I just pointed to those, had the bot do its work. I didn't even read most of this stuff. It produced three outputs, copy pasted what Ben had sent me on Slack, and said, I think we got all these covered. While I'm on this call, work is getting done, which I really love. I think the fact that I don't have to do this stuff myself is a godsend.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Now, when I go somewhere, I can basically just send Grokbot a photo, a screenshot, or literally just the name of the place. And I'll figure out what the place is. It'll look it up through Google Places API. And I get the right location coordinates. It'll fix the perspective and then remove people and turn it into like a 3D miniature visual style that I use on the site.

• 0:58Claire Vo?

  AI can feel like a threat to the creative arts. Like, look, your highest calling was never to design gradient fills in Figma. And what I tell people is...

• 1:12Claire Vo?

  Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Voe, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, I have John and Pong from the Grokbot design team. And they're going to show us two really awesome AI design use cases. One, how to build a beautiful, custom, and easy to update personal site that meets the bar of a designer. And two, how Grokbot was used to design Grokbot, including where Figma Bro can make your life at the gym and work a lot easier. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch.

• 1:57Claire Vo?

  These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire codebase. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch? It's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise-ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor

• 2:42Claire Vo?

  are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. Peng, John, thank you for joining How I AI today.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Glad to be here. Happy to share.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Thanks for having us.

• 3:01Claire Vo?

  So I am a big bot girl. Actually, we were just talking before the show. Last night, we did a Ladies Who Grokbot Night at Andreessen Horowitz. There were 900 registrants, a line around the block. Grokbot is having its moment. And one of the things I love is so many people inside SpaceX AI actually sharing really practical and unique use cases of how they themselves have found new ways to get work done, build software, do awesome things with Grokbot. So how has it been, you know, the past couple of weeks, just been being in the middle of this sort of explosion in Grokbot interest? How does that feel, shipping a product like that?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  It's really exciting. I mean, I feel like it's rare to have this amount of attention and this amount of engagement on something that a designer gets to work on. And I think we're learning, day by day, also from our users. I think there's a lot of questions being asked about us as though we're experts on the product just because we're designing it. But I think like, we're learning just as much from the users, from people sharing their own workflows, their tips and tricks, especially on X recently, and from you as well, Claire. It's been really fun.

• 4:15Claire Vo?

  People don't know this, but before we started recording, we were actually scrolling through and prepping screen shares. And as we were going, all of us were like, oh, we need that feature. We need this feature. We need to make this a little bit easier. So it's fun to be able to see the process of this product evolve as it has tremendous product-market fit right out the gate. Well, Peng, I know that you have a workflow that you want to show us. And one of the things I love about Grokbot and AI agents in general is it's just really opening up new ways to do old things and easier ways to do things that we all used to do before. So walk us through what you're going to show us and why you think Grokbot is the right way to take on this task.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I have this pretty personal story. I eat a lot of Chinese food. And then sometimes when you get a takeout, you know, the rice comes with this white paper box. So there's a red Chinese temple on it. And then last weekend, I was looking at it, and I had this random thought like, where is this temple? Like, is it a real place? Where is it? So I searched online, and I found it might be somewhere in San Francisco Chinatown. And I was like, okay, let's find it out. Like, I went to Chinatown. I worked around for a while, and I did not actually find the temple. But I took a bunch of photos along the way. And there was this little produce shop selling fruits and other stuff.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  And I took a photo of it. And later, I was waiting for a bus, and I used AI to turn it into a 3D clay miniature. And I thought, it looked pretty cool. And then later that day, when I went back home, I planned to redo my personal website. I procrastinated for that for a while. And then I took that 3D grocery store, and then I put it, drop it onto the homepage. So it's a little bit of whimsical. It's fun. The page is super minimal. Basically, it was just this tiny store. And then some text about me. At the end, I wrote something like, "Last seen at JBC Market in Chinatown." And I was like, oh, this was actually kind of interesting.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Because I've always had this problem with personal website that, especially as a designer, you spend all this time making one, and then you launch it, and people look at it for like 30 seconds, and then they leave. And honestly, even myself don't really go back to see it that much. So I didn't want to make it just another personal website sitting there. I want it to be a little bit more alive and actually be more useful to me. Because I'm also the kind of person that I try to like check into places. And then I like this idea of having a record of where I've been, who I was with, and like what I was doing. And there have been like so many apps on the market to do this. Like, every couple of years,

• 7:11Speaker 02

  there's one new checking app, and then people use it for a while and eventually disappears. So I was like, oh, why don't I make it just my personal website? Why don't I create it myself? And immediately, I thought, if I'm going to do it, I don't want to manually do it every single time. Why can't it just update itself when I go somewhere? So that's when I started to talk to Grokbot. Because normally, even for this like simple, small ideas, I'm not sure like what I need. Maybe I need a CMS. I need some kind of admin portal. I need to upload an image somewhere. I need to host the website, deploy it, store the code. And I'm like, I don't want to build all of that.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  I don't even know, like, where are we getting started? So I just want to test it, how it works with Grokbot. I basically told Grokbot, here is the idea. What's the simplest way to do it? How can we make this work? And we just started building it. There's no Figma file. There's no SPAC. Honestly, I didn't really know where it was going. I was just trying to build one thing, and then look at it, and then think about, oh, what if it can do this? What if it can do that? And then implement it. And then we get another idea. So it's very fun just to go in with the flow and like trust the vibe. And eventually, this idea turned into a checking pipeline.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  So now, when I go somewhere, I can basically just send Grokbot a photo, a screenshot, or literally just the name of the place. And I'll figure out what the place is. It'll look it up through Google Places API. And I get the right location coordinates. It will process the image. It will generate a light version and a dark version. It'll fix the perspective and then remove people, isolate the facade of that building, and turn it into like a 3D miniature visual style that I use on the site. And then I was like, okay, location is one thing, but a lot of time, more interesting part is the people, like, who am I with? So I added that, too.

• 9:22Claire Vo?

  I was going to say, that looks like Twin Peaks. I was like, is it Twin Peaks? Did I get it right? It looks great.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, those three days ago. So now, when I hang out with a friend, I can literally send a screenshot of the place and a screenshot of my friend's social profile. And the Grokbot will take over the rest. So I have this checking bot that I specifically built for this workflow. It figures everything out. It turns it into a data structure that my website expects. Maybe we can try it now. Like, if three of us meet in a physical place, maybe a famous landmark or something, you can name a place.

• 10:04Claire Vo?

  Oh, I'll name, because I live in Bernal Heights. So why don't you say we're at Bernal Heights, I guess just called Bernal Heights Peak?

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Either like a specific building or like a landmark.

• 10:15Claire Vo?

  Yeah, that's, it's kind of like Twin Peaks. It's just a different, it's another hill in San Francisco.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Okay, since we are not there, but we can.

• 10:22Claire Vo?

  Oh, at the swing. There is a clandestine swing. You see it right here? Yep, that's it. That somebody keeps putting up and the city keeps pulling down. Very, it's like a real point of contention.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Okay, let's see if it works. And I'll put your social handle and John's social handle there.

• 10:44Claire Vo?

  I love this pipeline. I have to take a step back while you're getting this to load. So I think the hardest thing for AI to do is build a personal site that a designer will like about themselves. So just the fact that you were able to get to that point, I mean, I have been a designer in a past life. I just avoid my personal site because I hate the idea of deciding something represents me and shipping it. So the fact that even you could get to something you like, I'm very impressed with. And then the second thing that I think is so fun is you've made it really easy and low friction for you to keep the site updated in a really unique, high-quality visual way.

• 11:30Claire Vo?

  So I think that is really interesting. You know, if you had to like go home and download your photo and copy and paste in the X profiles and do all this stuff, you probably wouldn't keep the site updated. It just, it takes, it's too much mental load. And so I love this idea that you've compressed all these steps that you would have had to do, you know, historically, probably through some sort of CMS or pushing directly to the site, to just a bot that has a very specific use case and does this for you. I'm curious, while this is running, how did you get it to generate these 3D images so well and so high quality?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the pipeline behind it is like figured out by Grokbot. It would generate two images, one light, one dark, because when I, like, when a theme turns too dark, I want the lights to turn on. I wanted two versions of the, of the image. And then they have to be consistent, and then this was baked into prompt. And I think the interesting part for me is none of this is actually fancy. It's just a bunch of like pretty simple building blocks. There's Google Plays or Google Maps, and then there's image generation, and there's some like structured data. And then there's the website, just render everything. And then Grokbot is basically the thing that connects all the dots together.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  And I think that felt a little bit different to me because before I would have probably had this idea. I've thought about all the stuff I need to do, and I was thinking, maybe do it later, and I'll never do it. But here, I didn't really have to know like what the final system was going to be. I just started with this like random photo from a produce store. And then like one thing just led to another, and Grokbot helped me along the way. At the end of the day, somehow I had this like check-in system running.

• 13:27Claire Vo?

  I really love this. What, I'll give you kind of a really chaos reigns idea, which is we had this woman, Maddie Reese, on our podcast recently, and she opened up a personal API so that people could pull information about her and also post to her site. You could give very select use of, you know, very select friends, some programmatic access to update on your behalf in case you forget, you know? You can make this a little bit of a social experience. You can see, you know, decide who you trust to do it. But this pipeline is so nice. It seems like very fun to, to kind of make a social experience as well.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  You're gonna come full circle and make the next check-in app.

• 14:11Claire Vo?

  You are. We are. I have a very funny, my, my husband and I have been together for a long time. We've started a lot of businesses. And probably 20 years ago, he was trying to do a social check-in app. And he would liter, I would literally, I would be at bars, we would be friends, he would be at bars. He's like, can you please, can you please check in, check in on my app at this bar? It's like true, true bootstrap guerrilla marketing back in the day. And now you can just tell your AI bot to check in on, on your behalf.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Well, Peng, if you can get this connected to Swarm, I'm definitely gonna plug into this as well.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  I'm still, I'm still an OG user of Swarm.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been using it for a long time. I do see it as a trend that people become more expressive and become more autonomous, and they can set up their unique way to doing things, to check in, to record their life, to like bring this memory in the, in the format that only adapts to like their own preferences.

• 15:11Claire Vo?

  You know, another thing that I want to call out for designers, because again, in a previous life, I was a designer, is I have considered myself very creative for a very long time and have a good sense of, you know, this thing that everybody's calling taste. But what, what does good look like and what is high quality? But I lacked some hard skills and really struggled with a specific, a specific set of hard design skills I felt were very inaccessible to me. So look, I can like round a corner radius to the pixel, like the per, I can like, I can get kerning right. Like I, I am a UI UX designer, that I can do all day and all night. I cannot illustrate to save my life.

• 15:56Claire Vo?

  I know what a good illustration looks like. I cannot do it. It is just not in my skill set. And so one of the things that I really love about AI, as somebody who has a basis of skills, maybe strategic experience, but not hard skills in specific practices, is it makes my ability to be a more well-rounded designer a lot more possible because it gives me these generation tools and these computer use tools and these deep like spikes in specific skill sets that let me pair it with the things that I'm actually good at and get a better outcome in general. Do you all ever feel that where you're like, oh, man, in the past life, I would have never been able to do this like 3D clay render?

• 16:40Claire Vo?

  I would have always wanted to, but I've had to ask my awesome 3D rendering friend to do this. Like, do you all experience that? Is that just me?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  I think many people are discovering that it unlocks a lot of the skill sets that you once thought were inaccessible. I think both of us, from my experience, it's a lot of motion work where I can describe it and kind of even use my hands to point out what's supposed to take place. But then with prompting, it becomes possible. Peng, I'm not sure about you, if there's anything beyond what you're showing.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  I, I think the opportunity is like the cost of making things become so low that we can imagine something that cost a lot more in the past, now it's so easy to do. And then this opens new opportunities and combination of the things we can create.

• 17:24Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I would say the things that I'm seeing a lot, and I tell designers this, you know, I do think there is, it looks like callous, beta spade. AI can feel like a threat to the creative arts, like it just can. People talk about it all the time. And what I tell people is like, look, your highest calling was never to like design gradient fills in Figma. Like that was not what you were put on this earth to do. And so as a designer, being able to really go up the stack in terms of leverage, specialization, the edges of quality, the edges of delight. Think about things like sound, think about things like video, think about things like illustrations and images.

• 18:09Claire Vo?

  I just think lets people like operate at the highest level of their craft as opposed to getting stuck in the kind of junk at the, at the bottom that, you know, is important in the foundation of building something really great, but not the highest use of someone's like time or talent. As AI adoption grows, so do your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. Their Agentic Trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down.

• 18:52Claire Vo?

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• 19:36Claire Vo?

  Oh, look, it, it looks like it finished.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's done, and I think it's published to the website now.

• 19:45Claire Vo?

  Very cute.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  We have this, I'll also capture the swing.

• 19:51Claire Vo?

  I love it. If you want a real Easter egg at night, you know, we have the secret guy putting up the swing and during the day, the swing is the swing is gone because that's what's happening with the very controversial swing at the Bernal Heights Park. But I love this. How fun and just something that I would have never imagined you could do before. This is so cool. You know, this is a personal use case and I think a really lovely one. But let's switch over to work stuff because John, you've been using GrokBot to design GrokBot and have some really interesting workloads you're going to show us.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, happy to talk about that. I think for me, some folks have already read an article that I wrote that was how I designed using, no, no, how I designed GrokBot using GrokBot. And I go over a couple of different ideas of how it's unlocked productivity for me, how it's really made some of the tasks that used to be really inaccessible or really boring more accessible and a little less boring. One of the ones I wanted to talk through today was on Figma Bro, which I also shared out as a bot template. So other designers out there who want to try it can use it. Hopefully you can help improve it and share it back with me and I can update it in my own GrokBot. I just want to talk through two quick use cases and that's the first one being on the screen right here.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  This is an actual prompt that I gave it using voice recording. So I'll just read it. Okay, here's the situation. I have a link in Figma as an example. On the left, I have a screenshot of a couple of icons. That's this over here. That need to be essentially placed next to each of the bots in the exact same placement. I have the second screenshot, which shows ones that don't have an icon next to them. So take the icon, scale it up, put it in the same position as the rest of the bots that I've screenshotted and ensure that they're in the same position, scaled up icons, so that I have a whole set of these. If anything is unclear, tell me. And the reason we needed this was because Ben was doing some community assets and asked me to put together something really quickly. It was 8:52, so I was wrapping up at the gym and I was able to just screenshot in Figma, these two separate art boards of work that was already in progress,

• 21:55Speaker 01

  one being from the icon library and the other being from the brand book. And doing so, I just pointed to those, had the bot do its work. I didn't even read most of this stuff, but it produced three outputs. And I was like, great, copy pasted what Ben had sent me on Slack and said, think we got all these covered. And then it made this little table. I was still at the gym at the time, so this is more voice messaging. But then it kept iterating, maybe making it a little bit bigger, rounding it so it looks good. And I can check that it looks good in a rounded state. And then eventually getting feedback that maybe we could play with the color and so applying that as well. And this is the type of thing that maybe, you know, wouldn't take super long in Figma, but now I'm just doing while I'm not even at my computer.

• 22:39Claire Vo?

  Can you just walk us through exactly how this is hooked up to Figma for folks that kind of just don't even know how this magic happens?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's a Figma MCP, which we use and is pretty effective, especially if you just give the, once you've made the connection, give your bot the link to it and give it some very specific set of controls. In my bot itself, it has the skills and some specifics that I request of it. I like to have my art boards laid out, you know, side by side horizontally in maybe 50 pixels apart or 100, depending on the size of them. And I tell it all these things upfront so that it doesn't give me like a messy file when I come back to it. It works really smartly with a template I found. And so from before, I kind of had to direct it a few more times, but I have a second example that I can show you, which is a little bit more precise with how I set it up.

• 23:30Claire Vo?

  Awesome.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  And this was just earlier today. Right now it's around 2. This was an hour ago where I was asked to create some marketing material for our latest bot marketplace, which is launching today.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  And we want to highlight some of the primary use cases. We have the bots that are being provided to us by people, yourself included, Claire. And we're highlighting some of these things in marketing material. And so what I did was, I'll share you what I did in Figma. It was up here. I made one quick template and I labeled it for Shub because he asked me for it. And I told the bot, using that, which I linked right here, here's the message, here's the template. Use our brand book backgrounds and wallpapers and match the styling that I have, but apply it to every other one. And you'll notice that some of them don't have the photo fully updated, some of them do, which means I need to go back and prod it. But this just saved me the time of needing to go manually onto each site,

• 24:28Speaker 01

  pull down each photo, update each one, change the instance, change the background, change the copy. It's all done for me here. So while I'm on this call, work is getting done, which I really love. I think the fact that I don't have to do this stuff myself is a godsend.

• 24:42Claire Vo?

  And I have to say, look, TradBot spotted right there. Claire's personal bot, very, very popular one that has really changed my life. I love this because, you know, again, this stuff is so beautiful. And as designers, what you want to spend time on is making these assets really great. You don't necessarily need to be doing production design, which is, you know, carrying it across different assets and polishing in different versions. And so your ability to spend more time, I'm presuming, on the like foundations that make this system really extensible. And then letting Figma Bro, love the name, let Figma Bro, Figma Bro and TradBot would be friends, by the way.

• 25:27Claire Vo?

  Let Figma Bro kind of like do the production work, I think is really amazing. And then for folks that missed it, you know, what I tell people is I use AI to get me off my computer, not on my computer. And so the fact that you were at the gym, got asked to do something, you know, especially something like Figma that really does require like your human fingers on a, on a, on a touchpad or whatever to do it, and your disability to be like, yep, go for it, get it done and finish your workout, I think is, is so nice. It's just like a much nicer way to work.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And speaking of on the go, the other bot that I want to highlight is DevBot or Experiments. Both of them I kind of use interchangeably. But the high level idea behind these is a lot of times you get an idea, an interaction or a layout, a specific type of design that you want to explore. But once again, you might not be at your computer. Classic shower thoughts moment where you want to capture something and maybe even get it to a certain level of fidelity, but you don't have the time and energy just then and there to do so. Which brings me to DevBot, who works really closely with Experiments also over here. So, I mean, you're starting to see a pattern in the way that I work. This was also on the go. I took a screenshot of our actual mobile app experience,

• 26:43Speaker 01

  a screenshot of my bot called Slack Search and gave a voice memo to the bot saying, I wanted to make a specific type of prototype. So I described it all using voice, kind of rambling a little bit. But in essence, it was when I share an agent, we've been using this term of a snapshot, a template. It's not the agent itself, but it's a copy of it to give to another coworker or friend or whatever. And so the idea was what if it would actually do a screenshot effect? If I click the share button, it takes a screenshot, shrinks down, zooms back to the previewed template. And I just had that idea, wanted to test it, gave it to the bot to run with. And it talked to Motion God because there's a lot of things that I described that were things, elements on the screen that were transitioning.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  It had its own conversations. I barely even checked it, once again, until I came back to its work. And I'll just jump to the end state, which is right here. We had to recreate some of the components within the test rebo that we have, but it came up with two options of what I asked for. The first being if I click share agent here, there's a little screenshot effect, then zooms into it and shows some of the details. I could see the routines of the bot and it moves when I switch tabs, shows the plugins and then you can copy a link and send it. And I asked for a little bit more of a subtle approach as well. And it basically took that and turned it into a version that just goes directly into the share modal. And so clever idea, in the end, decided not to go in this direction.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  It felt a little bit too derivative of kind of the iOS screenshot idea that originated this whole exploration. But I do love how easy it is to take just a concept that normally you would have to either prototype with the noodles in Figma, take the time to actually consider how it gets built if you're prototyping in code, describe it in plain words and say, run with it. Do with my description of it how you will, interpret it and turn it into something that I can interact with. So ideas bot, maybe should be the combination of what I'm using today as Experiments and DevBot. But yeah, the random shower thoughts can now become a real working prototype.

• 28:48Claire Vo?

  One, one thing that, you know, again, I've been in tech a million years. And so in the past, I am telling you, some delightful, amazing designer would have been like, I have this great idea. We're going to like screen, it's when we do share, you're going to get the screenshot effect. It's going to like feel so good. It's going to like give people a spike of dopamine. They're going to love it. We're going to share more things. And what would have happened is you would have hit a product manager that says, not a priority. Show me the ROI, what's the OKR? And an engineer being like, I'm not going to build that stupid thing. I have tech debt to do or like a bunch of stuff. And even if you get through the gauntlet of both of those and you get it built and you're like, ah, nevermind, don't love it, don't love it.

• 29:31Claire Vo?

  People are angry. They're like, we dedicated time, we prioritize this. It's like you don't deprecate any of these things. And so the thing that I call this like the trash, trash can method of software development, which is like building things with the presumption that it is totally inexpensive to throw them in the trash, whether those are prototypes or things that you get to your customers. And I think it allows you to be a lot more expansive about what the process of product development, software development looks like, because you're not always stopping yourself saying, is this enough to justify getting it into the app? Is this enough to bother somebody to get it, you know, higher priority than this or that? And so for somebody who has built a lot of software in a lot of environments for a very long time,

• 30:16Claire Vo?

  that is the piece of products like this that really make me excited because you can iterate so quickly. You don't have to shut off that like creative part of your brain that says, well, what if this, what if that? And you don't have to be stressed that you're quote unquote raising resources when, when you come up with an idea that you're not a hundred percent sure of, but want to see what it looks like.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Totally agree. And I think that makes it more fun to be a designer again, honestly. A lot of the previous constraints, the parts of the design process and working cross functionally that were a headache before are a little less of a problem these days, like you said.

• 30:54Claire Vo?

  Amazing. Well, I love it. Just to recap for folks, Figma Bro, your design spotter while you're at the gym, getting the reps in on your art boards. And then Experiment and Dev Bot, basically like take your shower thoughts, take your walk thoughts. And the implementation is none of your business. Let them cook. You come back to an idea and then it's up to you whether or not you want to ship it or not. Okay, so this has been so fun to recap for folks. We've shown sort of like the personal workflows and how you can do kind of amazing things that you wouldn't have been able to do before with very minimal toil, using Grok Bot as sort of like a development and design pipeline. John showed us, you know, how to experiment, design,

• 31:38Claire Vo?

  do production more efficiently with Grok Bot. Let's just take a step back. Let's go to lightning round questions. My first one, just very quick between you two. Other than the bots you showed. And like, how do you think about your bots? Who are your favorites? How do you organize them?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  A lot of my digital life has been delegated to all different types of Grok bots. In general, I organize them in two buckets, life and work. So I have a couple of bots that dedicated for each part of my life. For example, my Chief of Chef. I manage all the bots, but I sometimes do talk to other bots. But I delegate the things I don't know who to delegate it to, to the COS bot. So I think last night I was asking it to buy some 3D printing filament for me. So that's the plastic material that 3D printer use to making things. And what's interesting is not only it can help you search, find and buy the item,

• 32:38Speaker 02

  you can actually train different tasks together. Like I asked it, once you are done, update the inventory list. Because I keep this 3D printing filament inventory in Notion. And I wanted to automatically add this record and purchase it for me. And I think that's truly the power of it is to like train different tasks in our daily life together. And it give it like a higher task and let it figure out what the steps, what needs to do, maybe can learn it. And then the next time you do it, just tell it, do the thing that we did last month. And then even have it automatically do it. I have an email manager, which will surface all my action items. This was last night, I was checking any action items from my input inbox.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  And then like there's some USPS delivery issue. Then I ask it to help me contact them. I have the calendar manager, who is become, in fact, to become my calendar now. So I'm scheduling someone for a coffee chat next week. And then most of my time today, now I just take a screenshot of the conversation. It can be on any IM tool. This one's on LinkedIn and I just send it and then ask you to put a placeholder on my calendar.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Almost never open the calendar app anymore. You can also put bots into a group. So let's say in this example, I had this idea, design a app that translates class me out to English. So I threw this idea into the group chat. And in the group chat, we have a PM, we have a designer, we have a engineer. And then they started to talk about the idea from their own perspective. And it's so interesting to see like how this simple seed planted in the group chat. And then now like derive new ideas around it. I even use it to prepare the podcast that we are doing right now.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  I don't have a microphone and I add my IT bot, who's like taking care of all my IT questions, what type of microphone I need. And I only have this one, does it work? And for personal life, it's replacing my news app. So every morning, 7:00 AM, I'll receive a newsletter and it's personalized. I tell it I want AI information, I want news about AI that are relevant to me. I wanted to like have it do fact check and then source the official links as much as possible. And then this one is a legal advisor.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  So it's taking care of a lot of repetitive tasks. For example, I'm in this waitlist for, I'm applying green card. I'm in waitlist for this visibility and checking manually every month in a path. So I just dedicated this task to it and then I give the link. And it will go check it every month. And then let me know, okay, where are you? You are in the queue, what's the waiting list? So data.

• 35:44Claire Vo?

  I love it. So it seems like you have just kind of like all the admin, all the life admin you need to do, whether it's shopping, whether it's, you know, checking in on different status, regular check-ins. And then I love the idea of like, I don't want an email anymore and I don't want a calendar anymore. I want a bot to show me where, like tell me where to show up and that's it. And so, you know, just for folks watching this, again, it's like make it as easy as possible to take the task you're doing to the finish line, right? Like you knew you needed to buy 3D printing filament, but you just don't want to open up the app, click the buttons, pick the right one, get sucked into the reviews, get distracted by the, you know, associated products.

• 36:29Claire Vo?

  You're just like buy, buy the thing. Or, you know, even calendar events, you like pull it up and you look and like, I have a conflict, what do I do? And you get distracted by Slack. Like all these things, I think, just allow you to kick off a task and pull it all the way through without distraction and just make sure that you get a lot of stuff done. And I think the breadth of use cases here is pretty incredible. John, do you have any that are different than this? Like one or two that you think folks aren't thinking of or that are a little different than the average, you know, admin shopping one?

• 37:05Speaker 01

  I do have some that are a little bit particular. And one is just, I just started a few days ago. I've been learning Japanese. And the thing about Japanese as a language is there's Hiragana, there's katakana, and there's Kanji. And so there's different ways of reading one language. And recently I had the thought to just maybe communicate with this bot, which is just a Japanese practice bot. Both in a way to up level my reading of Kanji as much as possible, but then have the pronunciation underneath it when I need it, as well as finally an English response. So I just basically told it, give me all three forms so that I can learn as I go in just regular communication with you. I was having it look for a specific book, as you could tell up above.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  I was going to have it translate it, but then it came out, so I ended up buying it. The other use case is, one, maybe this is very particular. I think we're all aware of how the American insurance system is set up. And for me, it's not even that big of a deal. It's just knowing that it's possible for me to set up the bot to know my insurance plan, take any photo of a receipt or, you know, any sort of doctor statement and just ensure that I'm getting the most bang for my buck. And this one, you know, half the time it doesn't even, there's nothing additional that I can get out of it, but it just gives me peace of mind knowing that I can send anything to it and know that I'm getting my money's worth.

• 38:29Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I want to give people, I'm guessing kind of how this is set up, which is you're like, this is my plan, here's my coverage. Anytime I'm going to get a prescription or look for a provider, go to a specialist, like reference my plan and make sure that I'm making the best decisions. Is that kind of the high level, what it does?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  And in addition, anytime there's an invoice or a receipt, I say, do I need to do another follow-up? Or, you know, am I getting the maximum savings?

• 38:56Claire Vo?

  I love this so much. As a self-employed person who finances her own healthcare, this is going to be one that I go set up right out the gate. Okay, last lightning round question. We're almost at the end of our time. I must ask, because you have so many bots, and they all have these personalities and names. You have Figma Bro, I have Trad Bot.

• 39:17Claire Vo?

  When the bots are being silly, when they're not doing what you want, how do you prompt? Are you all yellers? Is there some trick to getting your bots back on track?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Here's the thing about working at SpaceX AI is oftentimes when you need to troubleshoot, they ask for your session ID. And I don't want my coworkers seeing how I talk to my bot. And so I've gotten nicer over time, I'll say.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  I reply with a lot of emotion sometimes. But I think a useful tip is every time you can ask the bot to memorize this. So in the future, if this happen again, then just follow the script you learned last time. So kind of distill and then iterate it itself. And then the longer you use it, the better it become and more adapts to your needs.

• 40:06Claire Vo?

  I love that. Great, great tips both. One, remember who's reading your transcripts. And two, just ask your bot to remember how to avoid the problem in the first place. You've been so generous with showing this. You've given me so many ideas. I'm going to go back. You're going to get a brand new clairevo.com by the end of the afternoon. I am so psyched about this. You just gave me the best ideas. Where can we find you other than all over the timeline where bot is going wild? Where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  I'm chronically online. You can find me at John By, which is just my name.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, same for me. I'm on X. And it's lovely to be in every

• 40:45Speaker 02

  post and talk about design of the Grok Bot there.

• 40:49Claire Vo?

  Awesome. Well, and y'all go out and try it. Love, truly. It's been really awesome and regretfully has replaced my beloved OpenClaws. So I think it's worth a spin. Both of you, thank you so much for joining How AI.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you for having us.

• 41:06Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.