Value-First AI Daily - Mar 20, 2026

[00:00] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good morning, LinkedIn friends and Value First Nation, welcome to another episode of Value First AI Daily, your collaborative intelligence report. It is Friday, March 20th, 2026. Uh, Nico Lafakis, how you doing, man?

[00:18] **The Calm Before the Storm** Nico Lafakis: We are doing good. We're doing pretty, pretty dang good. Um, a lot of lot of updates this week. And um, I I'm I I could feel it. I could feel the calm before the storm. So I don't know if it's gonna be next week, I don't know if it's gonna be end of the month. It's it's crazy to me that we're going to see another model drop before the end of the first quarter. Chris Carolan: Wow. Nico Lafakis: Like that's just crazy to me. I it doesn't even matter, right? Like, I I think um, not Kimmy, I think Mini Max just released 2.7, which from what I hear is actually better than Opus 4.6, which is insanity to me. Chris Carolan: That is insanity. Nico Lafakis: I have been playing with perplexity's computer, which runs Opus 4.6. So it's not like something special necessarily goes on there. But to watch the process, there's like there's a whole different set, and you know exactly what I'm talking about. There's a whole different set of like tools and hooks that go on there that make it work very differently than you would see it work in like just normal cloud code. There's a lot more like second guessing, there's a lot more review that goes on, like, what I'm seeing and what I am noticing, if you haven't noticed, uh folks out there, is that this past week was nothing and so this is what I talk what I mean when I say releases, this past week was nothing but a slew of releases related to security. Anthropic drops its um, its Git repo code analyzer. After that, Kimmy drops uh a new uh model that is specifically tuned for security, specifically tuned for code uh code edits. New plugins drop for cloud code. What are they? From Anthropic, security plugins. Gaping like filling in the gaps, right? So, it's getting to the point where like, okay, now we're writing the software. The this is what I tell my brother too because he does this all the time where he's like, yeah, but it can't do this. I'm like, oh, cool. I'm glad you said that in about two, three months, it's going to be able to do that. Like, thanks for for letting me know what was coming next. Um, so, you know, people were talking about, oh yeah, but you know, vibe code slop. There's going to be slop all over the place. Nope. Not not anymore. Like so now now the amateurs are able to code software that is like as secure as small software should be, right? I'm sure that it's not going to be enterprise level secure, but there's also like for most people not going to be enterprise level users on their platforms, right? Chris Carolan: Doesn't need to be. Nico Lafakis: Right. It just needs to be good enough that like no one can steal your data, you know, your data or nobody can steal your payment information. That's pretty much all that's all it comes down to for SAS. So you put your data behind an insanity level protection like Superbase. I don't know. Um, which just recently got authentication as well, folks, so if you have Superbase. Um, everything is like all under one roof now, and it won't surprise me if Superbase starts doing its own like VPS for apps, right? Just to keep everything under one roof. I don't know why they wouldn't want to directly compete. It seems like they have a great partnership with Vercel, but basically what I saw this week was a change from cloud code where you can now preview in cloud code, in browser. So you can actually do cloud code plus rep or plus Vercel, plus Superbase, which Vercel and Superbase have connectors for Cloud, so that's not a big deal. And once you have those two things connected, let me tell you, Superbase free, Vercel free. So for $20 a month, you can code and host at least two um, two programs that would uh rely on data ba- uh databases through Superbase. But then if it was just purely, you know, strictly front end, then infinite, not infinite, but I mean like you could definitely do a lot through Vercel, like you do. I think I I did like 10 or 12 apps before I had to actually upgrade. Um, so yeah, I'm like I know that people use Replit a lot, but I'm sure that those of you who use Replit also have a Cloud account. So now you don't really need a Replit account. And because Replit charges you based on compute and how much, you know, people are using your stuff, you know, yeah, those costs could get really insane really quickly. Um, you know, I was talking about uh I've been talking about abundance uh a lot this past week and how, you know, there's just more and more signs of this stuff coming. And I was talking to Kyle Jepson yesterday and we were going into abundance and what AI means and what it's doing like for the world and and how it's it's making things uh shift. And he was saying that like he didn't really understand I know this is a far cry from like how's it going. Um, he didn't really understand like where things could could end up or like how they might end up, right? And I I did the the thing that I always do when I get stuck, I rely on game theory. And I told I was like, yeah, well, you know, it's very much like World of Warcraft. And he was like, really? I was like, yeah, like what's happening now is an intelligence explosion. Like everybody gets to be as smart as everyone else through the palm of their hand. And when you have that happening, like what's what's next? What's coming next that will cause a a seriously great disruption? Because there's nothing anyone can do about it. There's no way to gate it. So it will cause a massive amount of of disruption. Really soon there's going to be like a wave of financial resources getting released. Just a ton of apps that are seriously geared for helping you trade stocks, for helping you save money, for helping you retire, they're going to just hit the market like there's no tomorrow. And when they do, it levels the finance playing field. It's the sort of, I know it's a heavy topic for, you know, 8:00 in the morning. It's sort of the beginning of the end of capitalism. And even though that sounds crazy, bear with me. In World of Warcraft, prior to uh what changed the game entirely was the freedom of intelligence. The game was pretty much siloed for a long time and in order to understand like Max player damage and in order to understand like best builds and best way to go and this that and the other, there was a lot of experimentation. And then you'd have to go like personally talk to people, form relationships with people, go on forums, like really do a ton of research and then maybe you'd get like pretty cool. You'd get pretty far with your stuff. Then YouTube. And all of a sudden you could go watch other people's builds and you could go watch other people how they did in PvP and you could go learn about everything. And all of a sudden all these this amount of intelligence resource was just abundantly available. And because it was abundantly available, all the players started to move to the same sort of level. Everybody could get to the same level to the point where if you were going to play with another group of people, they would be like, oh, well, it looks like you don't have like this that or the other, which you should because according to the plan, that's what you're supposed to have in order to do this thing. Later on, it got to the point where they just started basically giving people stuff and saying like, oh, well now you can just straight up be at max level. You don't even have to have to grind your way through the game anymore. And that's what I'm seeing with AI. I'm seeing this intelligence explosion where just the nearly, I don't know, 80% of the plan if not more, like 90% of the planet or whatever, couldn't code, couldn't do anything with code. And now all of a sudden there's just this tsunami that's going across of people that are picking up cloud code and just making all sorts of crazy stuff with it. Everybody. And I've seen people I've seen like 10 people making the same app 10 different ways with like 10 different really unique features to them that are specific to that person, right? So like I'm already seeing the variation that will allow for the the individuality that will that also allows for the mos to naturally be created, right? Chris Carolan: Um Yeah. Nico Lafakis: So yeah, it's it's just like I'm I'm seeing the uh the Renaissance is taking shape and that's that's what I'm really happy about this week.

[06:05] **Democratization of Capability** Chris Carolan: Yeah, it's the democratization of knowledge, intelligence, capability. And like what just popped to mind, and maybe I need to watch the new um, thing on Netflix uh that there wasn't going to do um the mansphere or whatever.. Nico Lafakis: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Like um, because what I've been telling people since December, like when we like everyday Joes, like start using Opus 4.6 and cloud code and we're building. And then all these articles come out about how the smartest people in the world on this on these topics, the leaders in the space are using it the exact same way and doing it the exact same things. Like that's democratization of capability, right? And it is the opposite of some dude saying on an Instagram post, this is how I live, this is how I make millions. This is my cool cars, this is where I go, this is my house, and I want to teach you how to do it too. Nico Lafakis: Nope. Chris Carolan: It's like, nope, you're not, right? You're not over there and it's a trick, right? Like in that gap of knowledge in FOMO is what is creating the profit for that person that is a trap, right? And when all this convergence of just democratization of actually realizing the value of stuff, capability goes up, cost goes down, and then like and then as everybody understands how the financial system works, like there's you run out of like the leverage that has been used to build our system.. Nico Lafakis: Yep. Chris Carolan: Vanishes, right? So then the leverage becomes this is my experience with this thing and how I interpret it and the kind of value that you could get from me. Like and it almost everything is going to be on a case by case basis. If you agree that that's valuable for you, let's let's exchange some value. But like having somebody else decide what that value is and how it should be measured and like it's just not going to be a thing. Like it's not going to make any sense. It's not even like somebody's going to decide like, oh, we're just going to down with this system. It's not going to make any sense anymore. Nico Lafakis: [inaudible] Chris Carolan: It's already getting there, right? Like when we when we like get charged more for something we've been using and then we're just like, well that doesn't make any sense for me to upgrade because I can build it myself over here. Nico Lafakis: Yep. Chris Carolan: That's just going to it's happening at light speed right now. Nico Lafakis: Everyday every single day. Chris Carolan: And there's nothing to support it's slowing down. Nico Lafakis: Nope. I you know, interestingly enough, I don't know if you guys caught it. You might have because it was it's it's getting pretty popular. He's getting pretty pretty popular about it. I I do admire what and why he's he's trying to do what he's doing. Um, Bernie Sanders has been you could say on the war path. He wasn't first. I would have called it on the war path at first, but it's odd that as he sat down and mind you, he has sat down with a lot of the people at the forefront. Not I don't think he's had a chance to sit and talk with Sam or Dario yet, um or Demis. I'm sure that's coming next, but he has sat and talked to a lot of the uh scientists and researchers that work at Open AI and Anthropic who are telling him about the dangers that could happen and what could go on and if we move too fast, like, you know, where we might end up. Um, let's face it. Like we aren't really focused on being responsible with this technology right now. So releasing more and more crazy stuff, not really the greatest of ideas, right? So what I noticed was that he did a video where he was just having a chat with Cloud. And he was asking Cloud about yeah. Chris Carolan: I think I saw that. Nico Lafakis: It's a great video. I'm I'll share it after this. It's it's a great YouTube actually, I I'll send it to you right now. And what was awesome about it to me was that he was asking Cloud policy questions. And if you've ever talked to Cloud and you've ever like uh had any sort of like sit down conversation with Cloud about um any topic, really. You will you will notice the one thing that we love the most, which is that like how um just how like uh what do you call it? Oh my gosh. Um, objective the model is, right? How much it necessarily doesn't want to completely take your side on let's say a debate topic. It will basically say like, yeah, I see where you're coming from, but because it'll go and do all the research and cross reference and try to find out like, hey, is the idea that you're talking about, is the um, is the theory you're putting forward right or does the data not support what you're saying, right? So he's sitting there talking about like data collection and privacy and Cloud is telling him like, yeah, look, you know, that's it's a big, big problem because data is getting collected all the time and big business is selling it and people aren't getting compensated for it and, you know, it's causing a massive problem because a lot of it is being used for um not necessarily like you can't I don't know if you could call it nefarious necessarily, but a lot of it's just being used for personal targeting, for ad targeting, right? So, I don't know. Chris Carolan: Old way. Nico Lafakis: I just found it really interesting because the fact that I don't see anyone else in in Congress going this far to attempt to understand like what could happen in the future and so he asks Cloud about a moratorium. And initially, Cloud says it's a bad idea and cites that it would stifle uh progress and innovation. But then Bernie said like basically points out, hey, you know that it basically is going to cause lobbying, it's going to cause additional uh backlash, it's going to cause additional problems like we both know that you can't make rich people not want to be richer. we both know that like that's not going to stop. And so Cloud's like, yeah, you're right. They I was, you know, kind of leaning into a situation that wasn't very realistic. And then changes the answer to basically be like, yes, we should do some type of moratorium, which honestly, I'm not I'm not against. I'm not saying that we should, but I'm not against it. And the reason I say that is because we haven't mind the latest models that we have. We haven't finished mining them. We have no idea what type of emergent behaviors might happen if we keep messing around with them. We have no clue because the teams are constantly being forced to work on the next greatest thing and nobody has time to slow down to study what's already been created. And the colleges don't have the money to be able to get the models to be able to to be able to make a competitive model to be able to understand themselves what's going on under the hood. Because even if they can afford Anthropic API that doesn't allow them to like take the model apart and reverse engineer it to understand how how the weights and everything are working. Um, so yeah, I mean it's it's it's very interesting to me. Again, like this whole week has just been this whole like sort of safety week. And then the thing you just said about like the democratiza democratization of information. Um, and of like capability especially with software. So, I I wanted to so I found out that perplexity is no longer free. There's basically a limited limited number of searches that you can do, I think on a weekly basis. It's really lame. And so, all right, I really love it as a search engine over Google. Google seriously sucks now. Even Gemini sucks for like just regular search. So, all right, fine. I'll pay the 20. It it is honestly worth it. Perplexity really is that much better of a search engine. But now has computer. So I was like, well, we can't not mess with computer, right? Turns out, much like I mean, perplexity knows me a bit better than Gemini because Gemini basically talks to me about uh my wife, talks to me about my dogs, talks to me about where I live and applies those things to searches I do or information that I look up. But it's trying to be more personable. I understand that. Perplexity on the other hand is basically being much more utilitarian and that absolutely works for uh damn near everybody. So, I don't know if you want to uh pop this up on the screen because normally when you're working with like cloud code uh or just cloud in general, right? You'll get suggestions. But the suggestions are usually like, hey, build this this little organizer or, hey, build this little thing, whatever it might be. I come into perplexity and I I look at computer and it's it's all the things that I would want. I would want to monitor API costs across all the models. I want to know what it is all the time. I want to be able to like track Hubspot, Clerk, Vercel, and Railway changes. Rank admin complaints across booking apps uh and G2 reviews. So like go to market basically. Extract 90 days of Hayreach campaign. So like in for me, it's like go to market, go to market. Um admin that I would want to know. Admin that I would want to know. Audit my live Hubspot page and draft uh safe edits. So information I want to know/admin. I mean, this is all directly related to me. It's it's amazing. Um, by comparison to I don't know, every other thing you can think of, but this one.

[17:55] **Open AI Desktop App Expectations** Chris Carolan: Is this what we should expect when um, when Open AI says we're going to consolidate everything into a super desktop app? Nico Lafakis: I I think so. I think this is it exactly what you can expect um that you'll log into your PC or your Mac and when it starts up, you'll I don't know that you'll be met with a screen like this. It'll probably be embedded in your in your desktop uh background, whatever it is. And yeah, it'll probably have like suggestions based on what you've been working on in the week. I would imagine. Like, hey, do you want to follow up and uh I got I have to. I I saw this button. Oh, wow, so it just changes. So that's it. So the things that are for me, things if I wanted to build a business, things if I want to create prototyping, Chris Carolan: And that's things if I want to organize my life. Nico Lafakis: This is the thing like as everybody converges on the CRM to track my network. Chris Carolan: Right and that's as everybody converges on this experience, the concepts of well, not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. Nico Lafakis: Hey. Chris Carolan: Let's throw it out the window. Like it's a button click here. You don't even have to click on the button to have ideas. And again, like with the the crazy thing that makes this different is it's like the healthiest dopamine hit. Like we have ever like that's ever been generated by technology, let's say, right? Because usually there's a slippery slope, but because there's intelligence on the other side, it can still be a slippery slope, but it's like working on your behalf and it knows these things. Even to the point where we're getting the stuff and it's telling us to go to bed like at night, right? Nico Lafakis: Oh yeah. Chris Carolan: I didn't build any of that shit in and it's just just does that. Like, man, heavy day. I I should we call it? Like [inaudible] I probably should. Nico Lafakis: Yep, that's my line. Chris Carolan: All right, well we're not right now, but some days I do call it, right? Nico Lafakis: Yep. Chris Carolan: And it's stuff like that where it's like we've just never had our handheld with technology in this way before. And now we do, and that's why it does like the difference when you get to the heart of the differences between perplexity, Gemini, open API, um, or Chat GPT rather and um and Cloud, like the DNA of the system starts to come into play on how it operates at that like base human level. Um, and it's just like as people get exposed, it's on a rational level and again, human beings are not always rational. Nico Lafakis: No. Chris Carolan: Uh it's irresistible and it just makes too much damn sense, it's too much fun, it creates value. Like I haven't played a video game in weeks, bro. Like. Nico Lafakis: I got to tell you, I haven't I haven't played a game since Midjourney 4. So like since about March, April of 2023. I tried playing like the only games I can even try playing are mobile, and that's like in between sending commands to Cloud. Um, and then I don't because then I get wrapped back up into what I'm building and it's like, all right. But the only reason I have them is because it's like that's the only thing I can play that's short enough time span in between what I'm doing that like it's not serious and I don't have to like care about it. Um, it's it's an odd thing and at one point I was like, well, maybe I'll just code my own game. And like at that at least, at least I'll be coding a game and be able to like play with it that way. Um, I do want to show, let me see if I can pull this. Oh. Probably not. Oh yeah, here we go. Um, so I was oh man, it goes away. Oh, there we go. So I was meeting with the like I said I was meeting with Kyle yesterday. Chris Carolan: That's crazy. Nico Lafakis: And all I asked it to do, I said like, can you create a visual diagram that illustrates the relationship of Hubspot lead stages and life cycle stages so that my B2B SAS client understands how they function between lead capture, marketing, sales, and service. This is one of the most common problems in Hubspot, okay? Because uh uh what do you call it? Because lead status. It is one of the most complex things and because of opportunity. So, in marketing, life cycle stage starts as subscriber, goes to lead, you know, lead status basically is denoted on bottom, life cycle stage on top. So they even have a lead status of blog email opt in. I say they AI. Then becomes a lead, form content fill or through these, I'm sorry, that's that's definitely methodology. Um, so lead status is on bottom. Sorry. New lead, which is what I always tell people too. Um, MQL open, right? And then SQL in progress, hands off to sales if the SQL uh works out, which is interesting to me that like you would actually um do something in between hand off to sales. But what I've noticed, not only Cloud but uh Harry does the same thing. They assume that there is a double uh like sort of this like double filtering layer where the person, it's seemingly has gone through an automation filter to end up with marketing looking at them. And then marketing is actually handing it off to BDR and BDR is actually um pawwing and following up. And then if that actually lands anything, it goes over to sales so that by the time it hits sales, it's a legitimate lead. So instead of this like, oh their health score or whatever their their lead score matched and then, you know, take them over to sales, right? Like there's this lead score matched, marketing should be taking a look at it. If marketing says, oh yeah, that lead score match is legitimate, let me hand this off to BDR. If BDR says like, hey, that's legitimate, let me follow up with a call, then it goes to sales. Like that process change in and of itself is insane. That that process change is what will actually change your business for the better, right? Um, so it's like, all right, it goes to sales, turns into an opportunity. They try to contact. Maybe they turn into a customer, good. Otherwise, connected, bad timing or unqualified, right? Reenter nurture. So it's even telling you like, oh, if it's just bad timing, then put them back in a nurture sequence. Don't actually get rid of it, right? I don't know how I I know like I don't know actually. I at least over 20 companies that I know that if it is bad timing or unqualified, they throw them out the door. They don't bother to follow up with bad timing at all. So, gets to service. They're either going to become an evangelist or other. But you could see that this is actually a goal of service. And I noticed that this was actually So what it did is it turned the diagram into notebook LM. Right. Because in notebook LM when you're looking at uh stages like this, if you click on what it does is it has a mind map, which is almost like this. And so what it does is if you click on some area of the mind map, it goes and puts an explanation in the notebook into the text area. So this, I mean, to me it's amazing because it's like you're working with whomever it is, your client or what have you, and maybe they don't really understand what's going on so you just click on what does bad timing lead status mean in Hubspot. Yep. Right? You could share this to your client, right? And like you came up with this thing, it's really cool, you really like it. You could just ask Cloud, hey, can you build this out as an interactive thing that I can share with my client? Or you just share the chat itself, right? If your client has Cloud then they can go in and they can mess with it and they can play with it. That's the sickest thing in my mind. Like it's so crazy to me. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Nico Lafakis: That like you could just download this, throw it up on Vercel, send it to your client and be like, yeah, go ahead and like mess around with it, you know, on your own, see what's up.

[26:49] **Closing** Chris Carolan: Yeah, now we're uh and that's the kind of stuff we're doing every day right now, several times a day. Uh, when we're working with Ryan and we're working with any client like it's uh yeah, it's never been easier to like whatever it needs to be visual, audio, like text based, like however it needs to be explained, it can be and AI knows which way to explain it in based on the topic, right? Nico Lafakis: [inaudible] Chris Carolan: Like almost every time it starts to nail it and it's this just that's the feedback loop. It's always going to going to get better and uh yeah, we got to wrap for today. Um, but uh of course, all of this stuff, um or a lot of this stuff, especially what you just saw uh in Cloud can be found in HubHelper Harry uh as well. So appreciate that uh sponsor of the show. Check out hubhelperharry.com to get you help with Hubspot and uh man, dive in folks. Especially on the weekends. We're going to build some stuff and we'll be back on Monday to uh to show you what that's all about. Thanks so much, Nico. Nico Lafakis: See you guys.