{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://build.ms/2025/12/24/ai-without-the-hype-ns-spain-2025/",
  "description": "I spoke at NSSpain this year and gave a wide-ranging talk AI, building from the fundamentals to real-world uses — with something for everyone.",
  "path": "/2025/12/24/ai-without-the-hype-ns-spain-2025/",
  "publishedAt": "2025-12-24T12:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:b6eke66r3vbmnegg73qgprl6/site.standard.publication/3mmypfmg4sx2d",
  "tags": [
    "Top",
    "AI",
    "Conference Talk",
    "iOS",
    "Programming"
  ],
  "textContent": "It's a Christmas surprise! My AI (Without the Hype) talk from NSSpain is now available for everyone to watch.\n\nThis talk is wide-ranging and covers a lot of ground. I start by showing you a day in the life of using AI, discuss the fundamentals of how AI systems work, and then share ways to shape the way you work with AI to get great results. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, a developer or a designer, or just someone who wants to learn more advanced ways of thinking about AI — there's something for everyone.\n\nI'm not saying you should ignore your family on Christmas Eve, but if you're looking to learn about a lot about AI once the mice are no longer stirring about — I think you'll really enjoy my talk.\n\n<!--preview-snippet-->\n\n<iframe width=\"720\" height=\"404\" src=\"https://www.youtube.com/embed/I-SiXRYHfEM?list=PLztE34GS_piKKQ6y1dkkuhW76jLBHm3NV\" title=\"AI (Without the Hype) - Joe Fabisevich\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen></iframe>\n\n- Here's a direct link\n- Better yet, you can save it to my app Plinky, and watch it later.\n- And here's the full transcript below. It was pulled from YouTube and cleaned up with Claude Code, but I did skim it over to make a few minor edits and didn't notice anything that misquoted me.\n\n---\n\nIntroduction\n\nDaniel Steinberg: I know I talk about how old I am a lot, but one of the reasons is people ask me why I don't retire. And the reason I don't retire is because of this. I mean, most of my friends are elsewhere.\n\nDaniel Steinberg: So, I know I don't remember names, but I really appreciate talking to people. And on the bus ride up from Madrid to Logroño, which is quite a bus ride, Joe said, \"Hey, mind if I sit up here? We chat?\" And it's a great way to meet somebody that you only kind of know online. And people online, he's much nicer in person. And I'll tell you that he's an indie iOS developer. You might know him from his app Plinky. He also teaches an AI workshop because that's what everyone does these days. He's going to talk to you about AI without the hype. Please welcome Joe.\n\n---\n\nWho Am I?\n\nThank you so much for having me here at NSSpain. It's truly an honor to be here at this wonderful conference with so many of my favorite iOS developers. As you can guess, I'm here to talk to you about AI. But first, I'd like to tell you a little bit about who I am.\n\nI'm an indie developer and I spend my days working on an app called Plinky. It's the easiest way to save links for later, available on the App Store, and people really seem to like it. I've worked at every size company from a startup of two to internet success stories like Time Hop and Bitly. Most recently, I spent four years helping build the health client team at Twitter when it was Twitter, with a focus on improving misinformation and abuse at a global scale. I'm an open source maintainer and a writer, and these days I'm also a teacher.\n\nI help people of all backgrounds, technical and non-technical, learn all about AI, as we'll be doing here today. I love teaching people about this technology that's emerging in real time. So, I work with individuals and teams alike to develop highly personalized hands-on workshops.\n\nWhat I Love About Code\n\nA simple and reusable abstraction tickles my brain, as does the personal fulfillment of solving a really difficult challenge. Code on its own is interesting, but I also love using code to build products that people love.\n\nDon't get me wrong, as an indie, I have to do design, marketing, sales, customer support, and of course, build my product. I love doing each of these things a little less than I love to code. Some, a lot less, actually.\n\nBut what I love most is making a real connection with another person through the software that I build. I feel so lucky that I get to build personal, playful productivity apps that make people happy. I'm always moved when a person reaches out to tell me, and that's what drives me to do all the things that I don't necessarily want to do. These are the roles that I take on to enable me to keep doing what I love most.\n\nAnd that's why I'm going to be talking to you today about how to use AI for your job as a software developer to do more of the things that you love most and less of the things that you don't.\n\nWhat We'll Cover\n\nWe'll start by talking about where AI is today and how I use AI in my day-to-day life.\n\nThen we'll talk about the technology behind AI and why AI tools work the way that they do. This will help explain why AI will continue to improve and diffuse across the industry, reshaping the way that we all work. Most importantly though, we'll discuss the techniques that are required for successfully working with AI to accomplish your goals. There's a lot that AI can do today and plenty that it can't. I'm not here to convince you that it's a magical tool that can do anything and everything. And that's why I have this disclaimer.\n\nA Disclaimer\n\nAs I mentioned, this talk is about AI, and people have a lot of feelings about AI — understandably so. Because I help people learn about AI, I hear all of these feelings all of the time. Some people think that AI can't do very much and that it's just a lying hallucination machine. Others worship at the altar of Sam Altman and think that we're building a digital god.\n\nMuch like everything in life, I believe the answer is somewhere in the middle. There are many moral, societal, and security concerns to be had about AI — there are so many of them — and I genuinely wish that we were thinking deeply when having those discussions. The field is changing very quickly, so a few of the things that I present won't be the only approach or the only solution.\n\nI personally use AI a lot, and I'll walk you through how it's been a multiplier for my productivity. While I get a lot of utility out of AI, I definitely do not delegate all of my thinking to it. What remains most important as a software developer and as a person is your ability to think critically and to adapt to new technologies. That's why I want to ask that for the next 30 minutes, you put aside your preconceived notions about AI, regardless of what they might be. And then I'd love for you to keep an open mind to the ideas that I present. In 31 minutes, you can believe whatever you like. I promise.\n\n---\n\nA Day in My Life with AI\n\nI want to start by walking you through a regular day in my life, specifically the ways that I use AI. I start most mornings with a 15-minute bike ride up and down a quiet street where I live in New York City.\n\nSometimes I listen to a podcast. Sometimes I enjoy the sounds of the city. But lately, I've been opening ChatGPT's voice mode and simply saying, \"Teach me something new.\"\n\nLearning with AI\n\nIt's like having an encyclopedia on demand. If I don't know something, I just ask. If I find something interesting, I dive deeper down the rabbit hole. And of course, if I'm skeptical about something, I follow through and get more clarity. LLMs are like lossy encyclopedias. The more factual information there is about something in the training data, the more accurate you can expect an LLM to be. There's a lot of highly sourced information about bioluminescence. So, I feel pretty good about the validity of what I've learned.\n\nYou can learn about almost anything. If it's available on the internet, you can probably learn about it. It could be science, it could be history, or it can even be code. Lately, my bike rides have been filled with question after question about recent Swift evolution proposals. I'm not looking for an easy substitute for learning. Building a deep understanding requires practice and hard work. Instead, I'm using a new approach to break down a dense subject by asking the questions that I need answers to.\n\nBuilding Tools on Demand\n\nAs I'm walking home from my bike ride, I have an idea. I get back to working on my NSSpain talk and I use AI to build this slide. Every slide in this talk with a chat bubble was made with a little tool that I built in a Claude artifact. The chat bubbles were created to be an exact replica of ChatGPT but with my talk's color scheme. It was so simple that I built it with the prompts that you see on screen in less than 5 minutes. I didn't have to write any code. I just had to describe my problem and give that to Claude.\n\nArtifacts are accessible via the web, so you can go play with mine or even create your own based on it.\n\nNow, is this chat bubble generator my life's work? Of course not. It's just a simple tool. But humans are tool builders. Being able to build tools on demand with AI is what makes AI so empowering to a software developer.\n\nThis XKCD comic about automation used to be a joke, but now it's our reality. Rather than sitting in Keynote all day manipulating shapes until they look just right, I can now automate the process of creating a piece of software. Three prompts and five minutes later, I had exactly what I needed. No code and no thinking required to create a usable and reusable piece of software. Many problems are harder to describe than this, but sometimes it's actually this easy to describe and build something that you need. The cost of making throwaway software that helps you accomplish a specific task is now almost zero.\n\nNatural Language API Testing\n\nTake a look at these two APIs and tell me which one you like more. In the spirit of automation, halfway through a curl request to test Plinky's API, I realized I'm sick and tired of writing curl requests. I could use a GUI tool designed for API requests like Paw or Postman. But it would be even better to have a personalized tool. What if I could simply type \"create tag NSSpain\" and AI would create the correct curl request for me?\n\nI think about how I can do this and I have a brilliant idea. I open up Codex, which is OpenAI's CLI tool similar to Claude Code. First I ask Codex",
  "title": "AI (Without the Hype)"
}