How Microsoft's AI VP automates everything with Warp | Marco Casalaina

[00:00] Warp is pretty magical, but you can add to the magic and make it work more smoothly. You're talking about setting up little micro agents that do little tasks for you, either one-off ones like we saw in Warp or recurring and triggered ones. And then this is making your life just easier. As soon as I started using it for certain things like managing Azure, giving Azure subscriptions and stuff like that, then I was hooked. I was like, man alive, this is a really capable tool. [00:30] You don't really discover all the things that you can do with command lines. But I think once you start to test those, then it kind of opens up your mind to what is really possible. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Veau, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today I have Marco Casalania, VP of Core AI Products and AI Futurist at Microsoft. [00:58] Marca is going to speed run through five AI use cases where micro agents can reduce the friction of getting little tasks done, whether they're technical or not so technical. [01:09] Let's get to it. Meet Rovo, your AI teammate, connecting knowledge, people, and workflows so teams can work smarter and move faster. It helps people find answers, make decisions, and automate work, securely and with context, through Search, Chat, Agents, and Studio. [01:28] Rovo runs on the Teamwork Graph, Atlassian's intelligent layer that unifies data across your first and third-party apps so no knowledge gets left behind. And you always get personalized AI insights from day one. And the best news? It's already built into Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management paid subscriptions, so the power of Rovo is already at your fingertips. Know the feeling when AI turns from tool to teammate?

[01:58] you [01:59] If you rovo, you know. [02:01] Discover Rovo, AI that knows your business, powered by Atlassian. Get started at rovo.com. That's R-O-V as in victory, O.com. [02:15] Marco, thanks for joining How I AI. I am excited because we're going to see a tool [02:21] warp that we haven't yet seen on the podcast. [02:25] And we're going to see you use it for maybe [02:28] not its primary pitched use case, which is kind of agentic coding, but for some sort of more ancillary support use cases that you found to be [02:39] Really useful. So before we get into them, like, why have you hooked so deeply into... [02:44] warp in particular. [02:46] I started using Warp ironically because one of our own teams here at Microsoft [02:52] tuned me into it. [02:54] It was our PowerShell team and they were like, "You should try this warp thing. It automates PowerShell really well." [03:00] And so I tried it. [03:02] And as soon as I started using it for certain things like managing Azure and giving Azure subscriptions and stuff like that, [03:11] Then I was hooked. I was like, man alive, this is a really capable tool. [03:15] And if you're looking for the sexiest episode of How I AI, it is this, because we are going to show you [03:21] how to manage Azure resources with AI, which actually I'm making a joke because I think it's so funny, but these are the kinds of things that if you are a software engineer,

[03:33] or an engineering leader, or just building something, you are spending so much time on [03:39] DevOps, admin, configuration, IAM, all that kind of stuff takes all your time and you don't actually get to the fun part of coding with AI. So, you know, show us maybe that specific use case and why you think warp was such a good fit for that and what the pain was before you had a tool like this. [03:57] Yeah, let's do this. So I was working with my colleague Govind the other day. [04:02] and I needed to assign him access to a number of Azure resources. [04:08] and you give them granular roles. Here I needed to give him Azure AI User and Azure AI Project Manager, and this was part of a big project that Govan and I are working on. [04:18] Now to do this, [04:20] It's actually not that easy to be honest, to do this in Azure, and especially if I do it with a web interface. There is a web portal where I can go in there and for each individual role, I can go find the role and assign it to Govind, then the next role and assign it to Govind, [04:35] It's not very efficient. For all the roles I needed to give Govind, [04:39] I mean, this would have taken me an hour. [04:41] So instead, [04:42] I do stuff like this. This is my prompt. I say, I found Govind's email address in here to begin with. Then I'm like, "Okay, now give him Azure AI user and Azure AI project manager on this subscription that I'm looking at." [04:57] And here it does it, right? So it will call AZ. AZ is this command line interface. [05:02] And this is Warp's superpower. Aside from being a coding agent, which as I know a lot of people use it for, and I mostly don't actually, I actually use it more like this.

[05:11] Whenever there's a command line interface, a CLI that can do something, [05:15] Warp is freaking great at that. [05:19] And so it will call AZ [05:21] repeatedly until it runs to the ground. Now here, I think it made a mistake somehow, whatever it was doing at AZ roll, this one [05:28] It kind of made a mistake here. [05:30] And then it got right back to it. [05:32] And it did it and it's like, OK, I'm done. And then I say, OK, actually, [05:36] I needed to give him a contributor role on the whole subscription. [05:40] And it does that too. [05:42] No problem. [05:44] And so I use this for all kinds of stuff. [05:47] here, but for Azure administration, [05:50] And close your ears, Microsoft people. I have also used this to administer GCP. Worked just as well with G Cloud, the G Cloud CLI. [05:58] So it's great at this stuff. I was going to say, if you have been victimized by AWS, Azure, or GCP, [06:06] Admin interfaces for assigning roles. This is... [06:11] exactly the kind of kind of workflow you want to see. And a meta thing I want to call out for people because I've worked in DevTools [06:18] for quite some time. And one of the challenges as a product person and an engineer working on DevTools is [06:24] exposing a GUI on these very complex... [06:29] very interactive, [06:33] sets of permissions capabilities configurations it's actually a really hard design problem it's like a very hard [06:40] you know front-end design problem and what i love about ai having access to cli tools apis mcps all these ways to more programmatically access these capabilities

[06:53] is you can actually abstract away all of that front end stuff [06:57] And just let a user kind of query the system and get what needs to get done. And so if you're on the other side of this, you're not the user, but you're the builder of something like Azure. [07:10] This makes it so much simpler to expose a quote unquote like user interface to to someone like you who needs to get get a job done. And then I have to call out a second thing, which is you're also doing what what I would I used to. Sorry, RIP Stack Overflow a little bit. But, you know, I used to like Google Google. [07:31] how do I kill all processes for Adobe and then like find the command line [07:37] you know, the command and then paste it in. And then, you know, you get the error and you paste it back into search and you try to find it. And what I love about these more agentic processes that have access to the terminal and the command line is, [07:50] is you can just do that all in one, all in one interface. Totally. [07:55] Yeah. [07:56] Exactly. Now, I will tell you, though, that [07:59] There's a trick to making this stuff work. I mean, Warp is pretty magical. [08:03] to be honest, but [08:04] you can add to the magic and make it work more smoothly. And there's a couple of ways you could do that. I mean, if you think about what I did with AZ really, [08:11] If you look at my MCP servers, well, this one's off right now, but I do connect this to the Microsoft Docs MCP server when I'm doing like Azure administration, because sometimes, [08:22] You know, in this case, I knew exactly what roles I wanted to give Govan, but there are times

[08:26] when I have no idea what role somebody needs to do something like. [08:30] I'll be like, [08:31] give this person whatever role they need to use Azure Document Intelligence. [08:36] And like you figure it out, right? But rather than leaving it to its own devices, I can do as I'm doing here, I can connect it to [08:43] the Microsoft documentation MCP server, which is a pretty good MCP server, [08:47] And then it'll go look it up, and that makes it work much better. [08:51] Another piece of this, and we'll see it again in a moment, is the rules. [08:55] Flynn out. [08:56] Originally, like, out of the box... [08:59] Uh... [09:00] When I tell it, so I give it these rules. [09:04] And so like, [09:06] If I'm giving rules on a resource group, roles on a resource group, I should say, [09:10] I do need to activate my owner access first. So this is one of the common problems that I have, is that I have not activated my owner access, which is like a hurdle I have to go through. [09:19] And so I make Warp remind me, and Warp will be like, "So hey, [09:23] "Did you activate your owner access before I start doing this?" [09:27] because otherwise it's going to fail. [09:29] So you can give it these rules... [09:31] and MCP servers that kind of help it along and help it use this stuff. Of course, that's useful for coding as well. [09:38] But, you know, I find it super useful for these kinds of things that I use it for. [09:42] Well, and what I will call out, and this is no shade, but this is not the most sophisticated prompting I've ever seen in my life. It's just like, hey... [09:52] When you're trying to do this, [09:53] remind me to do that. If you're waiting on me like

[09:57] pop open a browser, like wait for me to do the thing, and then always use the CLI tool. And so I actually love looking at your prompting here because it's very conversational. And I think people get like wrapped around the axle on like, my prompts have to be in a specific format and have to be these like very... [10:15] gracefully design things. And honestly, for most stuff, just taking the step of writing like two or three steps that you need a system to follow. [10:24] are what makes things [10:26] more effective. And then speaking of kind of like step-by-step processes, one of the other things I love about what you're doing with Warp [10:35] is you're just taking, again, I think these things that you could do, [10:41] in a UI. [10:43] And they would be annoying to do and not fun. [10:46] And just having a smart technical agent do them on your behalf. So you want to walk us through how you did that with your daughter's homework? Yeah, let's talk about that. [10:59] My daughter is studying for a math test right now. [11:02] And it's tomorrow. [11:04] And her teacher gave her a practice test. And I decided to scan that in because sometimes what I'll do is she'll take the test, but I'll take the practice test. I'll scan it in. And then I feed it to ChattyPT and I'm like, make me variance of these problems. And it will do it like inequalities and things like that. It'll make other inequalities that are similar. [11:22] but different so that she gets a little bit more practice on these things. [11:27] So I needed to scan this in. Now, my scanner has a feeder and so it sucks in the pages, but this was a two sided practice test. And so I needed to scan the odd pages, then I need to scan even pages and I needed to put it together. So

[11:41] What do I do? I go to warp here and I say it exactly. Scan the documents from the feeder and save it to this directory as this file name. And it does. It totally does do that. [11:52] And so it figures that out and done. It's done. Wait, can I can I pause you really quickly? Did this activate the scanner? [11:59] Absolutely it does. What? Okay. Yeah. If I were home right now, which I'm in the office right now, but if I were home right now, I would do this again, and you would see my scanner would wake right up and start scanning. So you didn't even have to press the little button and pop open the thing, and you just – Another thing. All I had to do was put the sheets in the feeder, and as soon as I typed this thing in – [12:18] Boom, there it goes. So for the youths listening and watching this show, as a parent, you spend a lot of time [12:25] with a scanner and a printer. I don't even know if you all know what that is. This is this is a peak peak efficiency. If efficiency for me is being able to just remotely start the scanner from from my coding tool. [12:41] And I'm not going to lie. Like, I scan, like, her birthday cards and, like, the Valentine's Day cards and things like that. Like, I am deathly afraid that one day there will be a fire and all of these... [12:50] historical documents that she's made will be destroyed, [12:54] And so I scan those into because it's easy, right? It only takes me a second. And I type this in here. [12:59] And now there it is. [13:00] Okay, so you scanned one side. I scanned one side. Now, warp is kind of bimodal, so it works both as an agent and as a not agent. So then I just pressed the up key. So you see the second time I did this, it had generated this command line here. When I pressed up, it just would go straight to this command line. And so I'm like, well, I'm basically doing the same thing again, but now I'm doing the even pages. So I just changed odd to even over here.

[13:25] And it just did that. So it didn't even need to call the large language model to do this. [13:30] But then... [13:31] I wanted to put it together. [13:32] So I said, now put together the odd pages and the even pages and just make the math practice test out of it. [13:39] And so now it wrote some Python to do this, actually. I guess it installed PyPDF2. [13:46] And it wrote a little Python file and ran it. [13:51] And then it removed it. [13:52] So in a sense, I am using here Warp as a coding agent, ironically sideways. [13:58] But, you know, it did it. I mean, in the end, [14:00] Absolutely. It, [14:01] Most certainly did. [14:02] create a unified thing. [14:06] Now, I have to give these AI coding tools and IDEs, etc., a little product feedback. [14:13] Which is I want like a time to task. [14:18] little timer here and I want it to say, hey, you did this. [14:22] in 112 seconds and give me like confetti. Because again, this is one of those things I just think about how you would have done it before, which is you would have walked over to your scanner, which I have one right here. [14:32] I would have pulled up the terrible... [14:34] native scanner software, you know, if you know it, if you know, you know. [14:39] and i would have like scanned the thing and downloaded the pdf and then flipped it and scanned the thing and download the pdf and then like found some pdf opener [14:47] and then like dragged and dropped the pages in the right the right order and then saved that file and [14:54] So, so, so annoying. And instead you get to sit where we all want to live right now, which is in the terminal. Yeah.

[15:00] in the terminal in dark mode and just ask it to do this thing. And I think something that, you know, maybe less technical people don't appreciate [15:09] is if you look at this and you look at these commands warp or generating [15:13] a lot of stuff on your computer. [15:15] you're able to do programmatically. [15:18] - Right. - And until you start working with these agents, [15:21] you don't really discover all the things that you can do with command lines. But I think once you start to test those, [15:30] then it kind of opens up your mind to what what is really possible [15:34] Well, what's interesting is [15:36] it caused me to look for ways that I could do things for the command line. So this scanner thing, [15:41] This wasn't magical. There is [15:43] As far as I know, not a way in Windows to... [15:46] CLI invoke a scanner unless you install NAPS 2. [15:51] If you look at my rule for this, [15:54] And what I said is, when you're in Windows and I tell you to scan something, use NAPS2 to do it. And I gave it the location of where I installed this thing called NAPS2, which is this scanner CLI. It's an open source. [16:05] Scanner CLI for Windows. [16:07] I installed this, I made a rule for it. [16:09] knowing that I scan things so frequently that this would save me a vast amount of time. [16:14] So, you know, again, like it's magic, but it's not entirely magic. You do have to do a little preparation. [16:21] for this trick to work. [16:23] This episode is brought to you by Lovable. If you've ever had an idea for an app but didn't know where to start, Lovable is for you. Lovable lets you build working apps and websites by simply chatting with AI. Then you can customize it, add automations, and deploy it to a live domain.

[16:40] It's perfect for marketers spinning up tools, product managers prototyping new ideas, or founders launching their next business. Unlike no-code tools, Lovable isn't about static pages. It builds full apps with real functionality. And it's fast. What used to take weeks, months, or even years, you can now do over the weekend. So if you've been sitting on an idea, now's the time to bring it to life. Get started for free at lovable.dev. [17:10] dot dev. [17:12] I am just laughing because again, I think my pitch at the beginning of this podcast, which is this is the most glamorous episode of How I AI, which is we're going to do Azure role, role assignment. We're going to do drivers for your scanner that can be run via the CLI. And then you have one more use case, which is as somebody who does a podcast and works with a lot of videos. [17:36] is really useful that I thought maybe you could walk us through. [17:40] This one is for you. [17:42] So I record a lot of videos myself, actually, and I have my little YouTube channel, although I can't say I have a podcast. It's not as regular as yours. [17:50] But yesterday I used the game bar thing, the Xbox game bar thing, to record a video off my screen. I said, "Maybe I'll try this, see how it goes." [17:59] For 10 minutes of video, [18:01] This thing recorded a 1.7 gigabyte file. [18:05] I don't know what it was doing. [18:08] But, [18:08] I mean, it was insane. [18:10] And I was recording this new tool that we're working on called Opal. Anyway, so I was like...

[18:14] What is up with this to warp? As you can see in my prompt here, I say, why is this file so big? [18:20] use FFmpeg to re-encode it, still keeping it at 1080p because I didn't want it to like [18:25] nestify the resolution. [18:27] and make it more normal size. [18:29] FFmpeg is a CLI that you can use to edit videos. And I use this all the time. I use it to strip audio off of videos. One day, my coworker sent me a video where like from seven seconds to 17 seconds, it suddenly went really quiet and then it went back to normal. [18:45] So I said to warp, I'm like, use FFmpeg to like make the sound 300% from seven seconds to 17 seconds. [18:51] And it totally does. But here, [18:53] It looks at the file. [18:55] And it's like, okay, the video is 1.7 gigs because it has a huge bit rate. [19:00] And it's at a huge resolution for some reason. [19:03] And then it followed my instructions. It ran FFmpeg with whatever the switches were to re-encode this thing. [19:10] And it did re-encode this down to 13 megabytes, which is what you would expect for like a 10 minute video of a screen share. [19:18] Thank you. [19:19] Yeah. And so again, like, I think this is one of those things that. [19:23] In an alternative world, somebody would have like gone to search and say like, [19:28] video compression software, tried to open something and like export and compress and figure this out. And instead, in just a couple of seconds, [19:36] you can use this more technical tool and get [19:41] a lot of stuff done and also sort of understand the root cause. You know, another thing that I think people don't

[19:46] really appreciate about AI enough. And we had an episode with a producer from Ken Burns documentary production agency. [19:55] is files are very rich with information. [19:58] And giving an agent access to a file, you can tell a lot. [20:04] about that file and then if you layer on an llm you can tell a whole a whole lot about that file and so i do think file manipulation is a real [20:13] underappreciated use like we do so much file generation but i actually think file manipulation is a really underappreciated use case of ai [20:22] Right. [20:24] Now, [20:25] If you think about [20:26] What I'm really doing with Warp, the way that I'm using Warp, I characterize it in a certain way. [20:31] I call this an ad hoc agent. [20:34] Because effectively, each one of these things that I'm doing, you know, when I'm assigning the Azure roles or when I'm scanning the stuff or when I'm doing stuff with the videos, [20:41] I'm kind of creating a little mini agent, an unnamed agent, [20:46] on the fly. [20:47] to do something for me. [20:49] And that's becoming a trend. Like this is a thing that's starting to happen, not just in work, but in lots of different types. [20:56] of general purpose agents. [20:58] Yeah. And what I would say is also what I love about AI and what I would recommend to people with AI is like, [21:04] just get used to ephemeral stuff. Like just toss it. Like if you ever need to compress a video again, don't save this script. Don't like just, just come back and do it again, probably with a better model at some point. And it's going to be just as cheap and just as easy. And so I think a lot of people get stuck in their head about like, oh, how do I make this a product? Or how do I get this production? It's like, don't get it to production. Just next time do it over again. Maybe save a rule so you're not rediscovering the steps. Right. But like you don't need to

[21:34] whole thing here. [21:36] And that's exactly the right idea, right? So when it, you know, for example, like it happened once that it tried to call NAPS2, the scanner thingy. [21:44] and failed because it couldn't figure out what the path to NAPS 2 was. And so that's why I made that rule that's like, [21:49] When I tell you to scan, [21:51] Here's where NAPS 2 is. When I tell you to scan from the feeder, [21:54] This is the switch to scan from the feeder instead of the flatbed scanner thing. [21:58] And now that it has that rule, it has never done it wrong since then. It does it right every single time, even though I'm scanning to a different directory, a different file, maybe a different format. [22:08] It does it right every single time. [22:10] You know, I'm not saying I love AI. [22:12] more than humans, but sometimes it would be really nice to be able to get that consistency. The people around me, perhaps my children who are not loaded with rules and context all the time and consistent output. Well, let's switch over to maybe some less technical use cases, but ones I think are really interesting. Again, thinking about ad hoc agents and workflows, [22:42] the next day. [22:42] sort of more administrative task-based workflow-based things to... [22:48] kind of be prepped for the work you need to do in a day. [22:50] Yeah, well, I mean, here I am in M365 Copilot. So this is Microsoft's general purpose agent for business. And a lot of people think of it like this, like I can ask it a question, when am I doing how IAI? [23:01] And it [23:02] shows it here. Here you go. It knows my calendar. And that's cool. But

[23:06] What's happening now is that this and many general purpose agents like it, [23:11] are becoming agent builders. The line between [23:14] Consuming an agent [23:16] and building an agent is blurring. So this is the new Workflows agent, and this is an agent that builds an agent. So I'm going to kick this thing off. And what I said here is, [23:28] When I get an email from Clairvaux requesting a meeting at a certain time, [23:31] Check my calendar. If that time is free, send her a 30-minute meeting invite for that time. [23:37] and it will start to build this agent. Now for the sake of time, I actually ran this in advance here, so [23:43] I can show you what it will build in a second here. [23:47] And what it has built [23:48] is [23:49] an agent. It's a triggered agent. It's an email triggered agent. And so, [23:53] An email comes from you. [23:56] and it will extract the time from it. It knows enough to extract it in ISO 8601 format, which is the [24:02] format that the API takes, the Outlook API, [24:07] uh... [24:08] It will check my calendar. [24:10] and it'll create the meeting invite. And if I save this thing, [24:13] This becomes: [24:15] a triggered agent that is now associated with my outlook so if you send me an email [24:21] and you're requesting a meeting, [24:23] You're going to get an invite from me if I'm free. [24:25] i'm not gonna abuse it but i do i do love it um what i would say is really interesting here is [24:33] The ability to set up synchronous response to asynchronous

[24:38] request, meaning [24:41] You know, probably when I email you, you are busy. [24:45] you are in a meeting. [24:46] You do not have I mean, I'm I'm I'm projecting now, but like you don't have the time to look at your calendar and say, does this time work for me or not? [24:53] But you know, when you have five minutes, you know, like, oh, I'm supposed to meet with Claire. [24:57] And she needs to be at the top of my queue because we want to get this podcast done. [25:01] And so I'm going to set up the system. [25:04] So as soon as she's ready, I'm ready. And I think that's a really nice flow. Again, I call this like burning down your anti to do list, which is if you can get yourself out of the critical path. [25:16] of doing a task and get AI [25:18] into that path instead, you can be highly responsive. [25:21] And not drop stuff, which I think is really useful. And I will say we got this thing scheduled quite well. So if you ran this on me, it was really good. Well, you know, you're a priority, Claire. So, you know. [25:37] He knows how to flatter the ghost or flatter the ghost. Oh, my God. You know how to flatter the host. It's that it's that Halloween podcast we did. It's still right. That was such a fun podcast that you're still feeling the ghosts of it. I am. OK. And then so this is sort of a more kind of reactive style agent that you built. [25:58] What about a sort of like more, [26:02] Cron-based, like timeline-based one, because you showed me how to do this in ChatGPT as well. Let's do this. Yeah. So like, what if you don't have M365 Copilot? Now, this same kind of function is showing up in the consumer.

[26:13] general purpose agents also [26:15] So let's say that, again, you are a priority, Claire. And so if you have a new podcast, I really, really want to know. [26:22] So I can actually set ChatGPT now to do this. I can say every day, look to see if there's a new podcast by Clairvaux. [26:29] and notify me [26:30] If there's a new one. [26:32] And lo and behold, [26:36] It absolutely does do it. It will daily at 9 a.m. I didn't actually even say what time to do it, but... [26:43] It decided on 9 a.m., [26:45] Every day. [26:46] At 9 a.m. [26:47] It's going to check for new podcast episodes by you. And if I want, I can actually turn on desktop notifications so it will... [26:53] notify me, [26:55] on my desktop like boom new clairvaux podcast [26:59] But once again, [27:01] I have effectively built a little ad hoc agent here. This is an ad hoc agent that's triggered in this case on recurrence. It's like, as you say, a cron job. [27:10] It runs every day. [27:11] And it will do whatever it needs to do to check to see if there's a new podcast by you. [27:17] I love it. And so, you know, just looking back at, you know, the theme of this show, [27:23] You're talking about setting up like these basically little micro agents that do little tasks for you, either one off ones like we saw in Warp or recurring and triggered ones. [27:34] like we saw in Microsoft and ChatGPT, [27:38] And then this is making your [27:41] life just easier. So let's jump into lightning round questions. I have a couple of questions for you, which is one, you know, now that you have this, uh, kind of

[27:49] army or constellation of agents working for you. [27:53] How has it changed how you spend your time? [27:55] This saves me many minutes a day. I mean, just think about last night. [28:00] uh i was scanning as i said my daughter's uh homework my daughter's practice test [28:06] And I set Warp to running that. You know, I said, "Okay, Warp, you know, go scan that for me." [28:11] And while it did that, [28:13] She and I worked on one of the math problems themselves. [28:17] So rather than me fumbling with the scanning software, the crappy thing that says now feed this and it's letter size and all that stuff. [28:25] I just told Warp to do it. [28:26] It did it. [28:27] And I did something else while these agents are doing whatever it is I need them to do. Well, and the only, you know, only your only physical job was literally flipping the paper. So you still had I mean, you still had a role. [28:39] Very important part of the system. I had something I needed to do in this case. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I think you would probably agree that the tasks that you do end up spending your time on are... [28:48] higher leverage more intellectually stimulating more strategic all those things where we want to spend [28:54] our time versus like digging through [28:58] role docs trying to figure out is it like project owner or project admin that has the right permissions for this particular, you know, part of our stack. So I think I think just spending your time differently. [29:10] is such a high impact, high impact effect of AI. What about actually, you know, my second question is, you know, what about your... [29:19] Kids, you and I have done, we did a little mini episode on Halloween about Halloween app you did. You know, you've talked a lot about helping your daughter with homework.

[29:28] Do your kids have any interest in this? Are you teaching them how to do this? Or is it still daddy, you know, facilitating the AI tooling in your house? [29:37] Well, I only have one daughter and she... [29:39] is... [29:40] Not like me. I mean, I'm a tinkerer, so I will try these things over and over again. If I fail today, [29:45] I'll try it again tomorrow because in this world, AI changes [29:50] every day and what didn't work yesterday may well work today. So I will absolutely hammer away at this thing until it works. [29:58] Uh, [29:59] She is more, I would say, a mainstream user. She's certainly capable of using this stuff. And in fact, she is a wizard at Canva, I tell you. And like the Canva tool, the Canva, the agent that's built into that. [30:10] She's really good at that stuff. She could design something up just like that, much better than I can, frankly. [30:15] But [30:15] She's not a tinkerer like me, so she doesn't proactively... [30:19] try these AI things. [30:21] I don't really need to teach it to her per se. I feel like these are things that she is learning for herself and learning how it benefits her. [30:29] for herself. Okay. And then my last question for you is, and I'm really interested to see this because again, I think you're a pretty casual prompter. If I've put you on the spectrum, a formal to casual prompters, you are a casual prompter. Um, [30:45] What is your tactic when AI is not listening, when it is not giving you the output you want? What do you do? [30:53] I mean, I sort of am in which I will often be like, you moron. I specifically told you not to check in my .env file and you did it anyway.

[31:04] Now, again, in warp, there are rules. You might have noticed in my warp rules, if you look closely, there's a rule there that says never check in the .env file, you know, that environment file that sometimes has keys and stuff in it. [31:16] This is my pet peeve with all coding agents everywhere is that sometimes they just check in your... [31:22] .env files without you asking them to do that. But you know another one of the things that I do though [31:29] You know, I make rules in Warp, but not all of the AI tools that I use. [31:34] have rules. Now sometimes, for example, [31:37] I get these kinds of questions that I need to fill out and I want to limit them [31:44] in terms of their characters. So I also will pre-program certain types of prompts. And so here, let's say MBR5. [31:55] So I have all these shortcuts like this. [31:57] And I can say, answer from the perspective of Microsoft in 500 characters or less with no bullets or formatting. [32:03] If I just want to give a quick answer to some question, [32:07] And so I use this [32:09] in a way that's repeatable, [32:11] to get these AI tools to do what I want them to do. That is, [32:15] by the way, auto hotkey that I have running there. So I have all these kinds of shortcuts that I can use [32:20] without a hotkey that expand to [32:22] repeatable problems. Katie Robbert: Question, did Warp help you make all those? [32:26] Auto hotkeys. [32:27] These I have, I think, made entirely myself. I have never. Artisanally crafted. That is true. Artisanally crafted. Well tested.

[32:37] I love it. So you've created a library of yourself of little snippets that you know are effective. [32:43] that you can hotkey into your AI tools that you know you're going to get exactly what you want. [32:48] Precisely. I love it. Marco, this has been so great. I just, I love the idea of, again, just solving these minor points of friction. [32:57] with our genius large language models and supporting tools. [33:02] Where can we find you and how can we be helpful? [33:06] Well, find me on LinkedIn. That's probably the easiest place. So you'll see me on Marco Casalina on LinkedIn. [33:12] And I really do look like my picture. [33:15] Perfect. And anything exciting coming up or YouTube channel, anything that we can do to be helpful to you? [33:24] Just follow my LinkedIn channel. You'll see that I make blog posts. [33:28] and videos every few weeks or month. [33:32] And so you can see my new blog post and video there on my LinkedIn account. Amazing. Well, thanks for joining How I AI. [33:38] Thank you for having me. [33:49] 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. [34:06] See you next time.