Building AI into your software (without the hype)

We’re building a multi-million dollar education business with just two and a half people—powered by AI and automation. I break down the real principles, code, and prompts that let us scale fast without adding headcount. Follow me: Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more. Our education products: High Performance SQLite: https://highperformancesqlite.com Mastering Postgres: https://masteringpostgres.com High Leverage Rails: https://highleveragerails.com Screencasting: https://screencasting.com Chapters: 00:00 - Using AI to scale a traditional business 00:36 - Overview of our education products 01:11 - Where AI fits into our workflow 02:00 - Let computers do what computers are good at 03:13 - Principles for working with AI 03:57 - How we transcode and deliver video 04:59 - Using AI to write deterministic scripts 06:04 - Leveraging domain knowledge with AI 06:32 - Breaking down the publish workflow 07:00 - Automating transcription and captions 08:59 - Creating markdown transcripts from captions 10:08 - Building a modular, fault-tolerant system 11:59 - Syncing Cloudflare R2 with our database 13:37 - Handling transcription with 11Labs 16:01 - Generating VTT caption files 18:46 - Creating markdown transcripts with OpenAI 21:08 - Generating descriptions and snippets automatically 23:20 - Why small discrete steps matter 24:50 - Key principles for scaling with AI and programming 26:34 - Final thoughts on scaling without scaling headcount