Clay AI Anyone???

[Casual Observer]

I just built my first Clay table, this shit's like magic. You guys program, have you tried it yet?

[AArdvark]

What is it? (no Google)

[Casual Observer]

What is it? (no Google)

It's an AI powered database that you can build out data enhancements, formulas, anything you want just by telling it what you want it to do (little more involved but that's basically it).

[AArdvark]

(stares at explanation like a deer in headlights)

Ok. Me go now back to cave, try make fire.

[Casual Observer]

(stares at explanation like a deer in headlights)

Ok. Me go now back to cave, try make fire.

Ok, I'll try harder with a use case.

So I sell to companies who use a particular software (KnowBe4, anti-phishing training) and we can get them a discount on renewals so we need to run a campaign to let them know.

So where do I start? I need a list of KnowBe4 customers, which can be tough because its in security so very close to chest. But I know that there is a review site called G2 that incentivises users of that software to rate it and verifies that they do in fact use it. The problem is the reviews only give First Name, Last Initial, and Job Title. What do I do with that?

For like the last 20 years I would have gone through the reviews one by one, lookup in Google, grab the most likely Linkedin Profile (or other website if that doesn't come up) then no matter which type of website determine the company associated with the name searched and pop it in a spreadsheet.

Well, now cuz the magic that is AI, I have one tool that automatically "Scrapes" G2 for the names and titles and then upload to a "Table" which I built in Clay. The table has one column that automatically pulls in the first (10 actually) google results. Another column cleans a few odd characters off the end of the link. The next one is the AI Enhance function where you literally tell it in plain english what you want it to do and then it does that for each row.

In this case I instructed it to first determine whether the link was a linkedin profile or not, if so then output the current employer, if not then review whatever website comes up and determine the company of the person most closely matching the searched name.

A project that manually done would have taken days to pull off is done in seconds after a mere 30 minutes designing the table.

Marvelous Maching.

[Casual Observer]

Hey Vark, I thought of a better way to describe this thing: It's a smart spreadsheet that lets you tell each column what to do in plain english and it does it. Whether its a formula, a lookup, an AI answer, whateva you can think of. It's really just what Excel should be in 2025 but Microsoft dropped the ball years ago.

[AArdvark]

Excell I understand. Having an AI version that fills in all the data sounds pretty cool

[RealNC]

Sounds like you're praising the tool that will make you obsolete and leave you jobless.

[Casual Observer]

Sounds like you're praising the tool that will make you obsolete and leave you jobless.

Cute. No, I'm now essentially a cyborg. AI helps me with research, then AI dials the phone and decides if a human answers. Yeah, some of us are gonna need to partner with our future overloads to get by until we die off.

[Da King]

Sounds like you're praising the tool that will make you obsolete and leave you jobless.

AI will never replace the software engineer. Someone still needs to RUN the AI, and your standard engineering manager or product manager wont know how to do that.

It's amazing at simplifying my life though. That is one thing that Microsoft has done really well... Co-Pilot in Visual Studio is pretty impressive.

[RealNC]

AI will never replace the software engineer.

If you had 20 devs before, but with AI you only need 5, the other 15 are kind of fucked.

[Da King]

If history means anything... they wont try to get the same amount of work done with fewer people. They will try to get more work done with the same number of people.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I respect RealNC's realistic cynicism but the way I am choosing to look at it is that AI tooling like what Da King and CO use might increase efficiency for developers so that output can actually match what Product Managers promise.

I would use it for PICO-8. I will use it when I try to learn Python later this year.

I'd LOVE to use it for x86 Assembly. I doubt they have it for that.

They will never have it for Hugo and if they ever do half of the code it is trained against would already have been written by me.

[Casual Observer]

I respect RealNC's realistic cynicism but the way I am choosing to look at it is that AI tooling like what Da King and CO use might increase efficiency for developers so that output can actually match what Product Managers promise.

I would use it for PICO-8. I will use it when I try to learn Python later this year.

I'd LOVE to use it for x86 Assembly. I doubt they have it for that.

They will never have it for Hugo and if they ever do half of the code it is trained against would already have been written by me.

Alphadev from DeepMind can do x86 assembly apparently

[Jizaboz]

then AI dials the phone and decides if a human answers.

This is why I finally blocked all calls/texts from anyone not in my contact list after getting tired of creatively insulting whomever called after an obvious robo-pause lol

[Casual Observer]

then AI dials the phone and decides if a human answers.

This is why I finally blocked all calls/texts from anyone not in my contact list after getting tired of creatively insulting whomever called after an obvious robo-pause lol

Those are amateurs, my dialer connects before you say Hi. I only call business people though.