917: AI Tools You Should Know

Scott and Wes round up the hottest AI tools you should have on your radar; from text-to-speech wizards to self-hosted image generators. They break down what they’re using, what’s worth paying for, and which tools are changing their workflows. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:49 Getting too cozy with your tools. 01:34 Brought to you by Sentry.io. 03:40 LangFlow. 08:44 Super Whisper and Whisper Flow. 15:00 Dia. 23:16 Chat apps. Claude ChatGPT Raycast Cursor Midjourney (Imagine.art) 26:58 Self-hosted. 27:01 Comfy UI. 31:27 Automatic1111 and Forge UI. Xenova Shoutout 34:11 Sick Picks & Shameless Plugs. Sick Picks Scott: Rat A Tat Cat Card Game. Wes: Syntax Hats Shameless Plugs Wes: Syntax Hats Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

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

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we're going to be talking about AI tools that you should know. And these AI tools are all kinds of different things, whether that is stuff to help you in your day to day, or possibly even some coding stuff, but just really possibly little tools and tips and stuff that you might not have seen or tried yet. My name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. And with me, as always, is Wes Boff. What's up, Wes?

• 0:26Wes Bos?

  I was, while you were doing the intro, I was just trying to adjust my seat. It was, there we go. It was going too far back. I hit the wrong knob and I just went, I went all

• 0:39Wes Bos?

  the way down. Should do a whole episode like this where I'm just at the bottom.

• 0:49Wes Bos?

  Yeah, excited to talk about the different AI tools that we're using right now. I think like the one thing that I know, let me get up here. The one thing that I keep telling myself is like, don't get comfortable in the tools that you're using. Because even, even with Claude Code, you know, like I kind of brushed it off for a couple of months. I was like, ah, you know, I'm happy with Cursor. But like after talking to how many people are using this type of thing, I'm like, I gotta like, keep a bit of an open mind with these things.

• 1:23Scott Tolinski?

  I'm missing something.

• 1:24Wes Bos?

  Give them all a good shake before being like, ah, that doesn't seem that useful.

• 1:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, give it a good shake. Yeah, cool. Well, are you ready to get, go, actually, before we do that, if you're giving anything new, a new shake at all, whether that's a new coding language, new anything, or even you have an app that is starting to gain traction or anything like that, you'll want to be using Sentry at sentry.io. It is just a wonderful tool for solving your problems. We all got problems. I got problems. Wes got problems. I don't know if Wes has any problems, honestly.

• 1:55Wes Bos?

  I got plenty of problems.

• 1:56Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, well, we all got problems then. And Sentry is the perfect place to solve those problems, because let's face it, there's too many other problems to deal with to have problems in your codebase. And Sentry gives you tools to solve those problems. They give you tools to have visibility into those problems, whether that is a slow application, or a buggy application, or even just being able to truly understand what your users are doing and how and why. So check it out at sentry.io forward slash syntax. Sign up and get two months for free using the coupon code TASTY TREAT. And guess what? Sentry is like. I, you know, Sentry's always just been a tool that's evolving, but man, they're going through some awesome

• 2:38Scott Tolinski?

  stuff with new UIs, new tools, new features, and the product just rules, man. It's just one of these things that they're not resting on the fact that they have a good product. They're consistently turning it into a better and better product.

• 2:57Wes Bos?

  Is that out for everybody now? Like, I know that you can turn it on, but is that, I think that's the default now?

• 3:03Scott Tolinski?

  I'm not sure. If you, if you want to give the new UI a try, the little question mark help thing, and then there's a switch to new navigation, I think is the, the way it's listed.

• 3:14Wes Bos?

  That's very, very good. It's like, it's amazing that they can simplify the UI or the, the menu so much, but you still get all of the same amount of information and, and all the information you need, which is probably most important, right?

• 3:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Give me the information I need. Make it easy. And Sentry absolutely does that. All right. We need to stop talking about Sentry now. We love Sentry, folks. Sentry actually has some really cool AI tools. We should do an episode on that at some point. The first one I want to talk about is one that I wasn't even aware of until JS Nation this past little bit ago. JS Nation React Summit just happened. I was emceeing, many of you may have seen me up on the stage introducing, Q and A-ing a lot of like really amazing speakers. A lot of cool people were there. Huge, huge crowd. And, uh, man, what a great run conference.

• 4:06Scott Tolinski?

  They always are. Either way, Tejas Kumar did a talk on Langflow and langflow.org. And I was just, one, besides, he's an incredible speaker. So like, he could be talking about something I'm not interested in and it's still going to be captivating, but... This tool really did catch my eye as being a really interesting tool. And what it does, even just reading their tagline, it's a powerful tool to build and deploy AI agents and MCP servers. And it comes, batteries included, supports all major LLMs, vector databases, and a growing library of AI tools. This thing is a node-based editor.

• 4:51Scott Tolinski?

  So if you've used any other node-based editors, Comfy UI is a node-based editor, DaVinci Fusion node-based editor, Max MSP. Basically, you have boxes and you're connecting, like, patch cables to the boxes to do things, right?

• 5:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you got boxes, you got inputs, you got outputs, you got little things that come in and out. You connect them to each other.

• 5:12Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, and so you might have an input that is a chat input, and you might have an output that is a chat output, right? And you put an AI model in between there, you got a little chat window, right? An AI chat window. But the demo that he did, I thought was really, really interesting because he did a demo that was live on stage where he was connecting a box to essentially browse the page of the schedule for JS Nation. Because this whole point was about, you know, these interfaces, website interfaces are all so varied and wild that you might not be, it might not be easy for you to get the information you need.

• 5:54Scott Tolinski?

  So either way, he connects an input, chat input, he connects it to the website, he connects it to an agent, and then he connects it to, I believe, an MCP server to integrate with the Google Calendar. And he was able to say things like, "What time is Shruti's talk at?" And then it would just tell them, Trudy's talk is here, right? And then add that talk to my calendar, right? Contextual, blah, blah, blah. And you could build these little widgets and little tools with your own API keys in seconds just by connecting these things. And if you look at their tools that they connect with, it is just a massive amount of stuff,

• 6:38Scott Tolinski?

  whether that is, you know, Superbase or Slack or, um, you know, even Upstash or Perplexity. There's a lot of little things that you can connect here and there. And we had been talking in the last episode we recorded about where is like the if this, then that kind of these things. And this would be a, not necessarily an if this, then that, but it does give you a lot of tools to connect many different services on your own via a nice little UI in a way that you could really see that as being like a power user type of thing where like, ooh, I really want to do this, then this, and this, and connect it together.

• 7:19Scott Tolinski?

  And instead of maybe writing the code or going into a chat window and cursor and having the MCP servers connect, you can build like reusable workflows and things like that. And I found that to be just simply lovely. So Langflow is my first one and I, I thought this was great. I believe it's open source, so you can check it out on GitHub. Very cool stuff.

• 7:41Wes Bos?

  What's the idea? Is this, there's a company behind this? Cause I went to like download it. I tried to check this out a while ago and it, it like makes you put in the email address and I immediately was like, oh, this is some corporal BS. I'm not doing that.

• 7:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's by DataStax. DataStax has their own AI agents, production AI agents. They have their own product and pricing. Yeah. So this is just the tool itself that you can download and use on your own.

• 8:07Wes Bos?

  Oh, so there's no, there's not a subscription fee here because it's, you're simply just connecting things.

• 8:14Wes Bos?

  That like you can connect anything, right? You can put your own API keys in, you can probably

• 8:18Scott Tolinski?

  It's all your own.

• 8:19Wes Bos?

  Assuming have local models.

• 8:21Scott Tolinski?

  All your own API keys, yeah.

• 8:23Wes Bos?

  Okay, cool. And it's a, it's a Python app that you download as a desktop app.

• 8:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's, it's really great. I'm a node-based UI kind of guy. So for me to have a node-based UI for doing this type of thing seems like a really nice thing. So yeah, give, give Langflow a check. I think this was pretty neat.

• 8:44Wes Bos?

  Next one I have is I was working with John Lindquist, who is really into a lot of this AI stuff. He's obviously the guy that started Egghead. And we recorded a little episode of like his, how he uses his computer. And he's next level in thinking on how to use all these things. And one of the tools that he was using that I had written off for a while, which was an app called Super Whisper. And there's another one called Whisper Flow, which Kenzie Dodge is using. So I'm gonna give them both a good shake. But the idea with both of these is they are desktop applications that do voice to text. And I had written off these things for the longest time

• 9:26Wes Bos?

  because macOS has voice to text built in. I hit my control key twice and I can dictate what it is I want. And I think if you are not using voice to text and you're just typing like a barbarian, you, I highly recommend hooking up one of these tools to a hotkey on your keyboard, so that when you want to type something, you just hit the microphone key or whatever, and you just speak what it is you want. Now, these tools, Super Whisper and Whisper Flow, they use Whisper, which is a open source model for doing speech to text. But what they do is they

• 10:06Wes Bos?

  They're better. Like what I just did right there. I said, but what they do, they, they, you know how I like kind of stuttered there? macOS would just literally take every single word that I have and put it in there and I have to then take it out. These, these apps are better. See, I just did it right there. I said, these, these apps, that that's just how naturally we talk.

• 10:29Scott Tolinski?

  They're more better.

• 10:30Wes Bos?

  They're more better at dictating it. And then of course, they, they have a whole bunch of features where you can add in words that you say a lot. And that's huge for people like you and I, where we're always saying these random made up coding words.

• 10:45Scott Tolinski?

  Sentry.

• 10:46Wes Bos?

  Yeah, exactly. That's the biggest problem is getting them to recognize the word sentry as not C E N T U R Y. And I specifically was trying Super Whisper first, A, because it's Canadian, and B, because that's the one that John Link was using. But you can also download additional models. You can use the one in the cloud. You can stream it to the cloud, or you can, you can download local models and run it on your machine if you have a fast enough computer. The one thing that it doesn't do is it doesn't do like real time streaming of the text, which macOS does. I really like that. As you're talking, you can see what you're saying in real time. This one, you have to like say it and then stop and then it generates the actual text for you. I assume

• 11:31Wes Bos?

  that that probably come because I've used Whisper before and you can stream the output as you're talking. You don't have to wait for it to, to be finished.

• 11:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Do any of these work on iOS as well? I don't know how you would integrate that with iOS, considering the text to speech is so baked into the OS.

• 11:52Wes Bos?

  Whisper Flow says it has an iOS app.

• 11:58Scott Tolinski?

  Okay.

• 11:58Wes Bos?

  So I would assume it's just a custom keyboard, right?

• 12:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 12:01Wes Bos?

  But switching keyboards sucks on iOS. It's so slow.

• 12:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Wes Bos?

  So I don't know if that's, but the one on iOS is actually pretty good, especially. That as you're talking, you can just like stop talking and then you can you can type stuff, move your cursor around and then continue talking like it's not like you're in dictation mode or out of it. It's kind of fluid. So I'm a big fan of the macOS one, but I these apps will probably get Sherlocked at some point via macOS just implementing this.

• 12:31Scott Tolinski?

  I don't know.

• 12:32Wes Bos?

  But.

• 12:32Scott Tolinski?

  iOS has never fixed their keyboard and their voice to speech text to speech has always been kind of dog shit, even if you can type in the middle of it. But I do use it kind of nonstop. I just wish there were some of these nicer features like, yeah, correcting certain words or.

• 12:48Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Scott Tolinski?

  I don't know. Yeah. This looks nice. I do use a lot of text to speech. So or speech to text.

• 12:55Wes Bos?

  Speech to text. Yeah. So I'm gonna give these a good shake over the next couple of weeks.

• 13:00Scott Tolinski?

  Shake them off. Yeah, shake them.

• 13:00Wes Bos?

  Instead of using the built in macOS one and I'll try the iOS app and see how that fits into my flow.

• 13:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Wes Bos?

  It's I'm I'm quite surprised that Raycast hasn't done this yet. That seems like ripe for Raycast adding this feature.

• 13:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Raycast is probably going to be needing to work on some new features after this macOS announcement recently.

• 13:24Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah. Because macOS announced like Raycast ish features.

• 13:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, they're just like enhancing. Yeah, definitely Raycast ish.

• 13:33Wes Bos?

  And you can use a shortcuts app in them. The shortcut shortcuts app in macOS and on iPhone is actually really powerful and I don't see a lot of people use it. So I use it. It's just I I don't have any I highly doubt Apple will. The thing about like Raycast is it's like power users developers first and like I highly doubt Apple's going to put out something where you're like, there's going to be these little edge case bugs that they'll never fix.

• 14:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, that they'll never.

• 14:04Wes Bos?

  So frustrating. So I I don't feel scared for for Raycast. I am excited that.

• 14:11Wes Bos?

  macOS is putting that in though, because like it's just everyone who uses a computer should have that kind of productivity.

• 14:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I agree. Although I will tell you what, getting Courtney to use Spotlight to open anything is like, because she'll just like go into her dock and click on it or whatever. I'll be like, you know, you can do command spacebar and just type in what you want. And she's just like, okay, thank you.

• 14:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Wes Bos?

  That drives me nuts. Yeah, that's when I was teaching like a bootcamp. It was really nice because I could just show people how I worked.

• 14:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Wes Bos?

  And a lot of people would be like, I want to do that. I want, I see, I see that that is much faster, you know, rather than telling people how to do it. Cause they're just like, I can't be bothered.

• 14:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, next one here is something that may, maybe people have heard of. Or maybe they haven't, or maybe they're very bitter about this because let me tell you, we just released our browser, our browser episode about the state of web browsers. And I gotta say, man, people are really, really intense about their browser choices. I mean, I feel like we knew that, but like people are either really angry or they're very like, your, your browser sucks or whatever. But one thing, one very common thread was that a lot of people were very angry at the browser company for sunsetting Arc. And I get it. I liked Arc.

• 15:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah, rightly so.

• 15:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, Arc was my, my favorite browser. Here's actually two camps. People were like, Arc has always sucked. And, uh, you, you are bad for liking Arc. Or two, um, I loved Arc and I will never trust the browser company again. I understand both those. Um, but I will say this tool, since I got access to the beta, it says Dia, D I A Browser. So dia browser.com. It's an early access for Arc members. So if you've used Arc in the past, you can just download it and, uh, give it a rip. I think this thing is the start of what we're going to be seeing from browsers in the

• 16:20Scott Tolinski?

  future here, coming forward, because this in many ways is like cursor in your browser. You can reference tabs directly. There's a kind of constant chat window about any of the tabs you have open. You can ask it questions about a YouTube video even. So if you have a YouTube video open, you can ask questions directly about the YouTube video itself. You can compare several tabs at once, like you can reference tabs. So like if, let's say you had several different hotel options, you could add and reference those various tabs of those various hotel options and ask it questions. I think that is like really

• 17:01Scott Tolinski?

  pretty neat. And in practice, the, when you command T to open a new tab, the search window that you get is either a search window or a chat window, as in it can be both of them at the same time. So by default, when you go to open a new tab, you can either just type in a URL, you can type in a question, you can type in something you want to actually search for, and you can reference tabs, you can reference other things, you can reference websites, you can get answers directly there. And to me, this is starting to break the barrier of the, like, instead of you, and I will say this, I've been using this now

• 17:43Scott Tolinski?

  for like a week, and I have not opened ChatGPT since I started using this, because it's like, what's the point? I command T, it's already got a chat window, I start typing, or I'm asking it questions directly about something that's happening in my browser, and it's all just there. So fundamentally, how I work has already changed in like the week that I've been using this browser. It is in beta. I have seen a couple of things that people who are Arc fans will like. I've seen on Twitter them saying that the sidebar is being implemented. So the sidebar navigation, I believe, will be coming back for people who are bitter and upset about that. Two, I think there's one major feature that I would love to see from this that does not exist, and that would be

• 18:29Scott Tolinski?

  The ability to like truly interact with the page via the chat window. Let's say I have a spreadsheet. I would love to be able to say, make these modifications to the spreadsheet and have Dia do it, which it can't do right now. I do think that is something that they are working on, but I don't know for sure.

• 18:46Wes Bos?

  What does it do? It's just a chat app that knows about your open tabs and can answer questions?

• 18:52Scott Tolinski?

  One of the cool things is that there is a like a default profile for you. How do you like to learn? What do you like to to like? So for instance, if if Dia knows that I learn primarily best through video, when I go to search and ask it for something like, let's say a question about a video game. And instead of like going to Google and searching for answers about this video game, Dia knows that I like to learn via video. So if I ask that question to Dia, Dia is going to give me links, but it's also going to give me YouTube videos directly in those results that are directly related to the thing that I'm asking about. So it's kind of like a mishmash of perplexity with something like

• 19:37Wes Bos?

  Like a bit of memory.

• 19:38Scott Tolinski?

  Chat GPT.

• 19:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Scott Tolinski?

  And then being able to reference tabs. So there's a lot of little features that I haven't necessarily gotten deep into it. But like, yeah, you know, you're you're on a website. You have a question about some text. You can highlight that text and then ask the question directly in the browser, you know, with like one click. So I highlight some text, ask Dia, um, ask Dia about this. And then a Dia will will go off and it can do more research and it can find additional links. And, um, yeah, it's not like revolutionarily different, but there's enough niceties in this thing that like, it's already changing the way primarily that I'm browsing and interacting with the internet.

• 20:21Scott Tolinski?

  Now, the one thing I don't understand about any of these new paradigm of browsers is what's a mo like mobile? Everybody's using mobile like why why release a desktop browser as the main interface? This thing would rip on mobile. Why? Why isn't this a mobile first browser? You know, I don't know.

• 20:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah, that's maybe they're they're going for like their audience, which is power users to be their their early access.

• 20:47Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Wes Bos?

  And then, once it, once they have product market fit, as they say, maybe they'll move into something that's a little bit more mobile.

• 20:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. If you want to get more like use cases for this thing, their website has a number of like, here's all the different things you can do with it that are currently supported or whatever. But either way, a lot of people were wondering, why would you ever use something that the browser company made after what they did to you with Arc? They didn't do anything to me with Arc. They made a free browser and then they they they uh they sunset it like, okay, yes.

• 21:21Wes Bos?

  No, you can, people have the right to be pissed about that, you know, they sure pulled the rug on it and people.

• 21:27Scott Tolinski?

  But there were.

• 21:28Wes Bos?

  If you get really excited about a tool. No, but like, like, we're we're also pissed at all the stuff Google sunsets and I won't pay for most of that stuff as well. You know, like, you hope that a company has your your best interests in in mind. And especially when you get you spend, you spend your time, you invest in a product, you know?

• 21:49Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, you invest your time. But Dia imported all my ding Arc settings and all my workspaces and all my logins. And like, next thing you know, it's like, yeah, the UI is different and it's slightly different. But all of the stuff that I've accumulated in Arc is still here.

• 22:05Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So I I mean, I'm not that mad at it, especially because this browser is good. If this browser sucked, then maybe, yeah, then maybe I'd be pissed about it. But it's good. So I don't know.

• 22:16Wes Bos?

  You gotta think, you gotta think OpenAI is gonna put out a browser soon because it makes so much sense to browse the web with the chat rather than the chat just give you some external links that you can click off to if you need them.

• 22:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Wes Bos?

  Especially like.

• 22:34Scott Tolinski?

  This definitely verifies that to me because I'm, like I said, I have not been opening ChatGPT. I've been using this.

• 22:40Wes Bos?

  Yeah, and especially that it can access stuff that's behind a login, like.

• 22:46Wes Bos?

  OpenAI ChatGPT can't do that. And then like, that's the whole promise of of MCP servers.

• 22:53Scott Tolinski?

  But Yeah.

• 22:54Wes Bos?

  Surfing the web is the original MCP server. So it makes sense. I'll give it a shot.

• 22:59Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, give it a rip. I'll give you an invite. It is.

• 23:01Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 23:02Scott Tolinski?

  It has been one of those things that I I have done a 180 on from being like, well, I'm I'm out on the browser company to being like, really, they got it. Yeah, browser company has hands for sure.

• 23:16Wes Bos?

  Let's talk about like chat apps and things that you're you're paying for. So you, what are you, what are you paying for right now? And what do you, I guess you're reaching for Dia right now as your main chat app?

• 23:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I'm using Dia as my main chat, but I do pay for ChatGPT, especially because that's what Courtney has gotten really used to using. So we we just share a ChatGPT. I also do pay for Claude, but that's it.

• 23:46Scott Tolinski?

  What about you?

• 23:47Wes Bos?

  I pay for Raycast. I was using Raycast as my like main chat app for probably over a year. But I have been pushing myself a little bit more to ChatGPT because A, I really like the memory stuff that it has. So I was trying to translate some shirt sizes into like American sizes. And I just took a screenshot of it and I was like, what should I do? And it's like, ah, you're 510, 200 pounds. You probably should do this. I was like, oh, man, it it knows that, you know? And I was like, that that's kind of nice.

• 24:26Wes Bos?

  So I like that. I like the, obviously, the image generation stuff is really good. I've been paying for Mid Journey for probably three years, but I think I'm at about a point where I'm going to cancel Mid Journey because ChatGPT is is just good enough. And the other thing about the Raycast is that the Raycast AI opens in its own like window, which is really nice. And and you can go through it, but it just, it doesn't have desktop app. A desktop icon or like there's something weird about it being a pop up where I feel like I'm gonna lose it.

• 25:00Scott Tolinski?

  It's always been weird.

• 25:01Wes Bos?

  I can't describe what that feeling is. And the other thing is that like I have this nice cobalt two blue theme for Raycast, but it's not a good theme for viewing text. And there's not a lot of control in a Raycast theme. So I, I switched it to white and black to see if it's a little bit more comfy, but it just feel a bit more comfy in in chat GPT, which it doesn't make sense because you can, it's way cheaper to pay for Raycast. I think it's like eight bucks a month or something like that versus 20 for for chat GPT. So like you're saving quite a bit.

• 25:37Scott Tolinski?

  I have not used Raycast really ever for

• 25:42Scott Tolinski?

  AI stuff. Like I like Raycast, but I primarily use it for window management launcher, et cetera, et cetera.

• 25:48Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:49Scott Tolinski?

  Things. Yeah.

• 25:50Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's it's really good, especially like it's like time to answer is really fast. I know chat GPT has a desktop app and you can, you can set up a hotkey or whatever, but my hotkey for almost everything is Raycast. So it's kind of nice being able to do it. Because you just type in the box and hit tab. You don't even have to open a, I have, I have, I have caps lock A to go straight to the AI app, but you can also just ask something straight away in the Raycast prompt and hit tab and it will, it will fire it off there as well. So

• 26:25Wes Bos?

  give it a shot.

• 26:25Scott Tolinski?

  Spending more time in Dia for that.

• 26:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah, yeah. And then I was on DeepSeek for a while because I felt like

• 26:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Wes Bos?

  That at one time, DeepSeek was like by far the best and it was free. And like it was doing searching the web for a while. So every now and then I'll dip into DeepSeek and see how it is. But it's it's kind of funny how you're just bouncing all over the place, trying new stuff. I don't think regular people are doing that, though. I think regular people are probably just. Using ChatGPT and I don't really know much more.

• 26:57Scott Tolinski?

  Totally. What about self-hosted stuff? I have dove into comfy UI because specifically they have a desktop app now, which man, running the Python thing was really tough for that. You know, comfy UI is interesting because you you're you're basically generating node workflows. But it is kind of a wild world of like connecting these things. Like if I want to generate an image of a computer programmer sitting at his desk or whatever, I have to then like research which models to use, which all the stuff to use, and then I click go, and then I wait an hour, and then maybe something comes out.

• 27:39Scott Tolinski?

  Maybe I wait, maybe I wait three hours and then something comes out and maybe it sucks. So as far as like, I'm not doing anything on it. I am like, I am like, let's give this a rip to see how the hell this thing works. All right, I got it to, I got it to produce this. Okay. And then that's it pretty much for me.

• 27:58Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I've downloaded comfy UI. I've downloaded all the models specifically for a lot of the stable diffusion stuff, which is anybody who has like one of these headshot generator startups. They're almost always using like stable diffusion and like, it's kind of a weird world. I realized very quickly that a large portion of the like self-hosted comfy UI is just people making like inappropriate anime stuff.

• 28:29Scott Tolinski?

  It is, it is. I joined, I joined the comfy UI Reddit and then I unjoined it about 10 seconds later. I was like, holy cow, these folks are

• 28:38Wes Bos?

  And those are the people doing stuff in public, you know?

• 28:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, no kidding.

• 28:41Wes Bos?

  Way worse stuff happening behind the scenes.

• 28:45Scott Tolinski?

  It's a skeevy world for sure.

• 28:47Wes Bos?

  Does a very good job at, there's one plugin for it, which is like a face mod, which is you can take people's like basically I wanted to like make YouTube thumbnails of myself and I wanted to feed it a photo of my face and be able to generate a YouTube thumbnail. And this was before you could do this in ChatGPT. And in order to get the like face dupe stuff to work, you have to like, there's a couple hoops you need to to jump through and they're explicitly, they do not host ones that. Will will do anything bad around adult stuff or child stuff and whatnot, which is is good.

• 29:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I know that that that whole thing can be good.

• 29:28Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Wes Bos?

  UI it's it's been pretty good. The the one thing that kills me, though, is I just I run out of space on my computer so fast. Because these models are twenty thirty gigs, you know, you got two or three of them and and then like we're downloading, we're streaming ourselves and recording ourselves. That's like fifty gigs for an hour or whatever. So I often when I'm like scrambling to free up space on my computer, I'll just delete those models. And and now that I have super fast internet, I don't mind having to re-download them.

• 30:00Scott Tolinski?

  For me, here's what I found. I have a Mac Mini back there. I just throw that shit on there because like what what else do I have on Mac Mini? I have my Plex server. So and then I don't have to bog down my or like my actual machine. But I haven't I I haven't tried to do any video. I would imagine that would cause my entire computer to blow up.

• 30:20Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you got to have a serious, serious machine to be able to run the stuff at any. I I think where this stuff is really big is someone who is generating lots of content, but they don't necessarily care about how long it takes. So some like garbage Etsy seller is making twenty thousand tumblers of like whales shaking hands with bears that say dads are the best. If their name is Bert, you know, and then they'll there's just like every possible permutation on sublimated on a crappy Tumblr. Put it on Etsy.

• 30:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 30:56Wes Bos?

  Those people are using these to just generate absolutely every single combination there.

• 31:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that would be wild to be using this stuff for anything other than just huh, all right, that works. Cool, you know?

• 31:08Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I think it it will probably get better, but also. Like running, running local models is, is getting better. It is getting faster, even like in the browser. I had a whole talk on it, especially with WebGPU now.

• 31:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 31:22Wes Bos?

  But some of these really big ones are some, a bit of a, bit of a resource hog.

• 31:26Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 31:27Wes Bos?

  Alongside comfy UI, there's automatic 1111 and Forge UI. Those are sort of alternatives as well. Seemingly, like competitors or similar tools to Langflow, I have only dipped into automatic 1111 and comfy UI. So I'm going to have to give these other ones a, a good shake as well.

• 31:46Scott Tolinski?

  Is this automatic primarily based around image generated? Does a stable diffusion web UI?

• 31:53Wes Bos?

  Yeah. If you've ever used like a hugging face or anything like that, it's kind of a similar, it might even be the same.

• 31:58Scott Tolinski?

  Hugging face.

• 31:59Wes Bos?

  The same interface of it as well. But yeah, if you want to be able to use stable diffusion to make like Lego version of yourself or whatever, it's, it was, it probably not so much anymore, but it was a very good business to fire up these like, turn your child's photos into a coloring book.

• 32:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 32:19Wes Bos?

  For, for $6 or things like that. There was, or, or headshots or all of these different things, you know, touch up your face for dating profile images.

• 32:29Scott Tolinski?

  I do think that the image generation stuff is probably like the least exciting thing for me because it does, it creeps me out. Like the, the fact that people are getting fooled on all kinds of stuff these days. And it's just like, it, it's a little like, not my, the thing I'm most interested in, which is why Langflow is interesting to me because it's much more like productivity based, which I'm a productivity fan. By the way, speaking of hugging face, I met our homie, Zenova, Joshua Lochner at JS Nation. What a just wonderful dude. He had a great talk and just a super cool guy. So I got to interview him on stage even.

• 33:07Wes Bos?

  Oh, really? He's the author of Transformers JS, which allows you to run local AI models in JavaScript. So in the browser or Node, things like that. And yeah, he sent me a, he sent me a photo of you guys. And I was like, whoa, face reveal. Cause like when he came on the, when he came on the podcast, he was not comfortable even showing his face. I'm like, when he, he said he's speaking at that conference. I was like, that's for sure remote. There's no chance he's going to do a face reveal, but he did.

• 33:34Scott Tolinski?

  That's a, yeah, what a cool guy. So, yeah. Shout out to Joshua. Yeah, cool. Well, that's all I got. Folks, what kind of AI tools are you out there using that we didn't mention? Coding or otherwise? I know we just did a coding tool, a coding agent show and stuff. So, but I want to know what kind of stuff specifically you're using? Because let's face it, this is like, have you ever seen one of those images on, on Twitter? That's just like, here are the 20,000 new AI tools. And you're just like, I don't have time to look at all these.

• 34:03Wes Bos?

  Freaking hate those guys. Yeah, no, these, these are ones that you probably want to check out. But let us know if we missed any.

• 34:11Scott Tolinski?

  Okay, now it's time for the part of the show where we do sick picks and shameless plugs. I got a sick pick and it's a kid's card game. My kids got this while I was in Amsterdam. And I think it was just so they would have something to do while I was away. And it is the, the game is called Rat a Tat Cat. Um, and it's kind of an educational game, but man, our kids love Sleeping Queens and a lot of these card games that they've been playing. And this game you can get for like 12 bucks. It's a card game. It was super easy to pick up. Um, again, my kids are like six and eight, um, but I think they probably could have played this at five and seven.

• 34:53Scott Tolinski?

  No problem, maybe even younger. It's kind of, you've got like a memory game. There's some math involved. And my daughter, who is six, like cannot stop playing this game. She wants to play it every night. And it's quick enough where you can rattle off a game in about five minutes if you want. You can play a whole bunch of rounds and that way, you know, if somebody, like I lost every game the other night. But I know my, my kids can get a little upset if they've gone through several games and haven't won one. So the fact that, um, you can play enough games that eventually somebody probably different will win is, uh, it's nice. Um, but nice, a nice little card game for kids. Um, yeah, you can get it for 12 bucks on Amazon. It's really, really nice.

• 35:38Wes Bos?

  Sick. I'm going to sick pick our hats, uh, which is kind of shameless plug as well. But, um, by the time you're listening to this, you should. So we got, we got the syntax one right here. Right. Um, then we got the internet one, which currently sold out, but we got a whole bunch more on the way. By the time you're watching us, they're probably are back in the shop. Um, and then we also got the syntax felt ones and like, let me tell you, these, these are high quality hats. This is not just a, like a floppy hat that someone embroidered and then like they, it's like a crappy swag item. These are like hats that you're actually going to wear. These are high quality hats. Look at they're all, it's all custom.

• 36:21Wes Bos?

  Look at that syntax tape inside custom tags. There's a spelling mistake on the tag because I forgot to fix it.

• 36:31Wes Bos?

  All kinds of really good stuff. So if you want a nice hat, check out, uh, what, what's, what's the URL of our store there, Scott?

• 36:38Scott Tolinski?

  Sentry.shop.

• 36:40Wes Bos?

  Sentry.shop and, uh, click on the syntax collection and Sentry's actually got some pretty sick t-shirts. I wore my dead click t-shirt yesterday and my daughter was asking what a dead click was. And I was like, well, you know, on your iPad, when you, you click on something and it doesn't ha, nothing happens after a little while. She's like, yeah, I hate that. I'm like, that's a dead click. And then I was like, trying to explain that there's also rage clicks. When you tap it multiple times and she's like, oh, I'm like, that Sentry will fix that or at least show you what happened. Uh, when and she's like, okay, that, that makes a lot of sense. So check it out.

• 37:15Scott Tolinski?

  Check it out. Uh, love this. Love. I, I wore my syntax hat all day, every day in Amsterdam. So I said, I don't know about you. When I go traveling, it's hat time for me, although it has often been hat time for me very frequently. Um, hat time for me, definitely traveling. Uh, don't have to deal with a bunch of stuff. Cool. Well, thank you so much for listening and hanging around with us. We will catch you in the next one.

• 37:36Wes Bos?

  Peace.