I used to enjoy going online. The connections I made with people were almost always positive. I learned new and interesting things. I witnessed creativity and beauty in so many forms. I spent many years building philanthropic communities, creating space for people to love one another. I think we really did change the world in some small way. I know we changed mine.

But now? Going online – which isn’t as much a thing that we do, so much as a thing that we are – feels like walking through raw sewage in bare feet. It’s disgusting. I’m not even being hyperbolic – I literally mean that one of the most common feelings I get when looking at my screen is disgust.

The nonstop anger, the fighting, the hatefulness, the venom . . . it’s a pervasive cloud you can’t escape. I say this even as someone who doesn’t watch news programs or political commentary! But it’s everywhere. And it’s changing us as people.

You don’t need me to tell you this. If you’ve been around for a while, I know you see it too. We’ve become mistrusting, disingenuous, abrasive, intolerant – everyone shouting and no one listening.

So what?

Well, I think we’ve lost, is what. Collectively.

We’ve taken the greatest tool for personal connection the world has ever seen, and we’ve squandered it. We’ve turned it into a poison, and we drink it in, voluntarily, all day every day.

I constantly have this battle of two conflicting pathways inside me: 1) Disconnect completely from the digital space, except where necessary, or 2) Wade in again, creating more communities of people giving back.

Option 2 keeps coming close to happening, but then I remember how hard it was even back in the day when the world was different. Today it could be an exercise in brutality and heartache to create those spaces, and I doubt they’d be nearly as appealing to people now as they were then.

Still, I believe that putting more good into the world is one small way I can fight back against all the bad in the world, so I haven’t ruled it out. But honestly it’s a major struggle with no good answers at the moment. I keep thinking that it may be too late – that we may have lost already.

So I’m not really sure where that leaves me, let alone us. All I know is that I’m pretty sad right now. But in the spirit of the older days of the web, let me share with you a piece of creative beauty I just discovered this week. It’s a couple years old now, but it was new to me, and it’s probably new to you.

When you have 10 quiet minutes, take a look, and think about the days when you could go online and regularly find stuff like this, instead of doomscrolling political outrage.

The post We May Have Lost Already appeared first on Nate St. Pierre.

Today I’m in my forties, and by random chance this same woman and I are now neighbors, both single. My teenage self would have given up much to be in this position.

But of course there’s nothing there, no desire whatsoever on my part. Because I’m not the same person I was back then.

We say that so nonchalantly: “I’m not the same person.”

I think we say it so lightly because we don’t mean much by it. We’re just saying that our needs and wants and tastes change over time. And of course that’s right.

But I’ve been thinking about it more closely than that. I am separated from my teenage self by a gulf of life experience – mostly pain – that this kid has no idea is coming for him. If I could go back and tell him how hard and fast it will hit, and how long it will last, he probably wouldn’t believe me. It would seem impossible, right up until the moment it happened.

It’s so strange when I think back to that kid. I can close my eyes and experience things from his life – the feel of his bed in the dorms, the sound of basketball games in the gym, the smell of the genetics lab, the laughter of friends. Thousands of other memories.

But they don’t feel like mine. They feel like his.

The memories quite literally feel like they belong to a different person – like I’m watching a slide show of someone else’s life. I’m no psychologist, but I think I get this feeling because I’ve changed so much that I no longer have any idea what it really felt like to be that kid.

So when I say “I’m not the same person I was back then,” I realize that I’m not simply talking about my changing tastes . . . I think I mean that my mind and soul (?) have changed so much that I no longer recognize or remember them from who I was.

Does that mean that I think I’m literally a different person? Of course not. But also maybe a tiny bit yes?

Because what IS a different person? If our internal perception has changed so much today that our past perception is completely foreign to us, does that mean we’ve turned into a different person? If not officially, at least practically?

Complex questions to which I do not have the answers. Also I’ve been watching Severance, which plays with some of these ideas in really interesting ways.

Usually my posts have some kind of point. This one does not. Bye!

The post Time And Identity appeared first on Nate St. Pierre.

In November I put together a tiny team to solve a big problem: could we build an AI platform that a small business could easily afford – one that would instantly give them value across all areas of their organization, without anyone on their team needing to know a thing about AI, prompt engineering, or software development?

Could we build something that just WORKS – something that gives them highly specific results and incredible value from day one? A platform where they simply talk to it like it’s a person who works with them at their company, and it knows exactly what they need and how to produce it without any further context or explanation?

Turns out the answer is yes

I’m really, really proud of this. It’s a fantastic tool that I use personally in my daily work, and it saves me not just hours, but literally DAYS of my time per month. I built it to do the same for you – for everyone.

It’s super simple. Here’s what it does:

• Learns anything you tell it about how to understand your business
• Customizes a set of powerful, role-specific AI bots with all your business knowledge
• Lets anyone in your company use any bot at any time as a personal assistant in their job
• Literally does large portions of everyone’s work for them, quickly and accurately

The goal of the YouBots.ai system is to get you 80% of the way to completing any task in just 10% of the time. You can then finish off the rest and make sure it’s perfect before it goes out. You don’t have to know anything about AI at all. There’s nothing to learn, no context to give, no prompt engineering to master, no tech to figure out. Just talk to it like a person and ask it to do things for you.

It’s a simple monthly subscription service. No contracts, no user limits, no bot limits. Everyone on staff can use any bot at any time. Cancel whenever you want.

And it comes at a very low price, because the full staff of this startup is me and three friends who have built something that just works. It sells itself. We’ve declined investment funds and we’ve been profitable since day one. Our job is simply to keep adding and improving business tools to the suite, and keep your price the same. More value for you means more customers for us. Win-win.

Visit the site to decide if it’s something your company might want to try out. There’s a free one-week trial with no credit card needed. Just see if it works for you

By the way, this isn’t just another AI product to roll your eyes at – we put a lot of secret sauce into this so it works like magic to produce real work for real people.

If you have questions about the platform, just let me know! This is my full-time job now, so I’m at it all day.

Nate

p.s. all the little bots are super cute and have terrible weekend hobbies and also there are mom jokes scattered throughout the entire platform, because someone has to laugh, and it may as well be me

The post YouBots.ai Is Now Live appeared first on Nate St. Pierre.

Usually the days were sunny and brisk, with beautiful fall colors exploding all around, but winter comes early in Wisconsin, so occasionally there’d be snow on the ground and a chill in the air. We always went anyway. There aren’t many days circled on my calendar in a given year, but that graveyard walk was something I looked forward to every time.

Chris died unexpectedly earlier this year. He was only 39. I deleted his number from my phone because it hurt too much to see him on my list of frequent contacts. I felt a little bad about that, but in the end I think it’s okay. We all manage the best way we can.

This weekend, on what would have been our 20th year together, I’m heading to our favorite spot in our favorite cemetery to see him. There’s a little library room tucked away on an upper floor of the main building, where his ashes are stored in one of the books on the shelf. It’s the perfect final resting place.

We all know that time is short, but what can feel like an abstract concept sometimes hits home in absolute reality. I’m just glad the two of us spent our time together in a meaningful way.

Goodbye, Damico. I’ll miss you.

The post Farewell, My Friend appeared first on Nate St. Pierre.

I was meeting with a client this week – a sound technician and film composer from LA, an older gentleman. When the topic of early sound equipment came up, I mentioned my grandpa (who was one of the foremost authorities and largest collectors of antique radios, microphones, and sound equipment), and it turned out this man knew of him.

I got to spend a few minutes reminiscing about one of my favorite people in the world, and when I got to how much he believed in me as a young person and how he helped develop my curiosity and experimentation in technology, gave me my first job as a janitor at age 14, and supported me as I ventured into entrepreneurship in my 20’s, I started getting a little emotional.

My AI work this year has taken me to a lot of new places and thrown me into contact with a lot of new people, many of whom have their own ideas of what I should do with all the tech I’ve developed. I’m experienced and confident enough to chart my own course, but all this does have me thinking more about the people in my life who have helped me become this version of myself.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite clips of Mr. Rogers, so today I’d like to share it with you, and ask you to take a few moments right now to think back with gratitude on the people in your life who have “loved you into being.”

If I can give you a piece of advice that’s resonated with me over the years, it’s to never be afraid to be who you are. Don’t do what everyone else is doing just because you think it’s expected of you or because you’re afraid of being judged. Be your authentic self, believe what you believe, love what you do, and you’ll find your life’s work along with your community of kindred spirits.

Right now I’m happy to be connecting with a bunch of sharing minded, creative weirdos again, just like in the early days of the internet. It feels good to be where I am.

Thank you so much, Grandpa. I love you

The post On Becoming Who You Are appeared first on Nate St. Pierre.

So as someone who’s been building AI tools as a full-time job this year, I thought I’d write a simple, clear, one-paragraph description of what it can do and how to use it in a productive way in your own life. You don’t have to take my advice or even listen to it, but I can promise you that I have more experience in real-world AI than 95% of the people you hear talking about it right now. Here’s the paragraph:

What To Do

AI is not an overlord, and it’s not a savior. It’s not going to upend the entire world today, but it’s also not just a fad. AI is what technology always becomes after the initial shock: a tool. When properly built and properly prompted, a custom genAI tool can save you hours, days, or weeks of time per year by automating certain things that you would normally do manually. All you have to do is understand what AI is good at, identify those types of things in your life or your job, and then build a customized AI tool to specifically help you with those things, resulting in real gains in time and quality. That’s it. Do that, and you’ll be getting a 10x return on your investment, and be ahead of the rest of the world on AI as it stands today.

How To Do It

I say this all the time: the secret is, there is no secret. This technology is accessible to anyone. All it takes is twenty bucks a month to get in and start playing around, building your own custom GPT agents using human language instructions – you don’t even have to know a coding language. Earlier this month I wrote a detailed article on exactly how to build a Youbot that will massively improve your productivity and quality in any area you want: AI That Works: How To Build A Youbot.

I do understand that many people don’t have the time or the desire to learn how to use this technology, but the reason I repeat it is that I don’t want to be a gatekeeper. I’m not trying to learn this tech and then hide it from everyone else to maximize my own profits. If you have the desire to do this for yourself, I’m happy to point you in the right direction and share tips along the way. You’ll find plenty of examples and free utilities here on my site.

If You Don’t Want To Do It Yourself

At the end of the day, if you can’t do it yourself for whatever reason, I’m happy to help. I don’t run a big software shop – I have a happy little lifestyle business where I operate as a freelancer, building custom AI tools for you or your business.

I’m also different than most providers in that I’m not trying to lock you into my tech or my services. I will come into your business, work with your team to identify low-effort, high-impact areas where AI tools will make the most difference, and then I’ll build them on your own technology stack and AI accounts. If you assign a point person, I will teach that person how AI works as we go. When I’m done building, you own the tool going forward. You’re free to edit it yourself, copy and customize clones, or spin off new tools.

My job is not to corner you into a contract, but to educate and empower you to expand your capabilities on your own. If you’re interested in working together, you can get started here.

Also you can join the email list below for helpful articles, free tools, and more explanations of how AI is super easy, just like your mom.

The post AI Is Easy appeared first on Nate St. Pierre.

[TL;DR – I’ve created a Natebot with my own personality, but more talent. I’ll show you how to make one of your own so you can have superpowers too. I also build these for clients.]

[FYI – I used AI to help outline and prep this article, so I wanted to disclose that a few snippets of content on this page were copy/pasted from that output where it made sense to do so.]

My Philosophy On Knowledge Sharing

I believe that we are all lifetime learners, or at least we should be. Especially now with so many technological changes happening, we’re all in the same boat, trying to turn and ride the wave before we get knocked over by it.

In both my career and my personal life, I always lean toward sharing information rather than hiding it. I love it when people I hire turn out to be smarter than me and go build their own businesses. I love it when I share writing or coding or photography or community building tips with someone, and they go on to create something that makes my projects look small.

Do you know that the very first business contact I ever met in the real world as a result of my online work was a guy who wanted to pick my brain on how to grow a marketplace business model, because he had seen my digital philanthropy platforms take off so fast (and also because he was a member of my giveback team)? We had lunch together in Milwaukee one day to talk shop and swap notes. Six months later I saw his name floating around online . . . as the first CEO of Uber. He’s a multi-billionaire now. Of course I take full credit for his ascendance

It goes to show that when you jump in to build and learn in a new environment, you never know what you’re going to create, who you’re going to meet, or where your next step will take you. It’s fun, exhilarating, and often a little scary. The good news is that everyone else feels the same way, even if they seem on the outside like they have it all put together. So I believe in helping and sharing, whether you’re an expert or not.

Speaking of experts, we’re in an era where if someone tells you they’re an AI expert, you should give them at least a quarter-eye, if not a full side-eye. This stuff is so new and works so differently than much of what we’ve had before, that I can tell you that even the true experts (yes there are a few out there) are playing guess-and-check more often than not when building things. And that’s okay! But I at least want us to be honest about it.

In the spirit of sharing information and helping us all keep our heads above water, I’m going to tell you in this article exactly how to build a custom AI agent that does almost all the things for you that startups and agencies pay me a lot of money to do for them.

I’m not a fan of hoarding my piece of the pie; I’d rather just make a bigger pie. I mean, of course I’m not going to give you the exact code for my little bits of secret sauce, but if you follow my directions you can absolutely build something of your own that would cost you thousands of dollars, and that will make or save you tens of thousands of dollars over time.

I miss the early days of the internet when we were all building and sharing things, helping the entire ecosystem grow so quickly. These days it feels like most people want to hold out for instant monetization on anything they come up with, even though it rarely turns out to be profitable for them. But we’re in the wild west of AI right now, so let’s put on some throwback 90s tracks and get into some old school collaborating

Welp, Here We Are

AI will probably change the world completely at some point, and probably sooner than later.

It may take your job. It may give you a job.

AI might even fulfill sci-fi prophecy and become our evil robot overlords at some point.

But we’re nowhere near that point at the moment, so let’s not worry about it just yet. For now, I see AI as a way to enhance what we already do. It’s a tool to help us get faster and more efficient at the things we’re already good at, as well as give us some competency in areas where we might struggle. AI can make us more capable and more confident in any area we choose, and that’s the way I think it should be used today.

So let’s focus on that – how we can use AI to help us level up in our work, our hobbies, and our personal lives without feeling like we’re handing the reins over to the machines. (And we’ll grab some more time back while we’re at it.)

Building Natebot and Davebot

A few months ago, I started creating custom AI agents to help me with the multiple projects I was working on. They all had different specialties, but I built one agent very specifically to follow the creative thinking framework I had developed over the years, so I would have a brainstorming partner to work with that understood my process. I was happy to see that it was indeed capable of generating the same kind of creative ideation and strategy work that I do, except on a much faster and more extensive scale. I called this guy Natebot.

Natebot worked so well that I began incorporating it as a foundational creative thinking process inside of my other, larger custom GPT builds. Those builds were powerful enough on their own, but now they could also tap into some advanced ideation processes, giving them extra bonus power.

Natebot eventually evolved into a specialty agent focused only on creative thinking, which I renamed the Talemaiker Ideation Engine so I could install it on all my builds under that brand, to supercharge their worldbuilding capabilities.

I made the Ideation Engine available to a few family and friends so they could test it out (btw, it’s now out of beta and free for anyone to use), which brings us to my brother Dave. He has a regular day job, but for the past 18 years he’s been on the Milwaukee Bucks Rim Rockers trampoline dunk team, one of the highest-rated halftime shows in the NBA. Because of that he’s traveled all over the world for the NBA, performed at a couple of All-Star games, and does a lot of national and some international shows and competitions. This is him (gestures generally downward)

A couple weeks ago Dave said that the ideation engine had been helping him with some social media content ideas, but he’d been out of the game for a while and was considering actually working on building up his personal entertainment brand for real now that he has some other stuff cooking.

This conversation led us to the idea that I would build him a much more personalized and powerful agent that could help him get to that next level.

I built it and tested it. He used it and loved it. After we debriefed, he referred me to one of his influencer contacts who could use something similar, and now I’m building a Youbot for a creator with millions of followers, helping them ideate and produce content, engagement, and partnership opportunities at a much larger level. My tools will be helping the next generation of creators to harness AI and have it work for them, instead of them working against it. Everyone in the space will need to adapt or fall behind.

What originally started as an experiment has turned into a powerful way to get more done, faster, and with a higher quality of creativity and output. And, as we’ve seen, they can be customized to anyone, for any purpose. So now I build custom agents that I’m calling Youbots.

Defining a Youbot

So, what exactly is a Youbot?

At its core, a Youbot is a personalized AI assistant that functions as a supercharged extension of yourself.

It’s built to understand your background, your goals, and your needs already in context, so you don’t have to explain everything every time you need help. Youbots are designed to work with the same kind of background information that anyone close to you would already know, but they bring that information into the conversation instantly, and at a much larger scale.

If you already use public-facing AI tools in your daily life, you’ll notice a substantial difference in the speed and quality of output if you switch from vanilla ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini over to a custom Youbot. Not only that, but it’ll continuously evolve with you as you grow.

Think of Natebot – it’s my creative brainstorming partner. When I need to explore new ideas or flesh out stories or strategies, Natebot knows my thinking framework and gets right to work, generating ideas that align with my vision.

Similarly, Davebot is customized for my brother, helping him with content creation around trampoline dunking, pulling in his personal style, goals, and assets to deliver useful suggestions instantly.

The real magic of Youbots lies in how they are tailored to each person’s unique needs, priorities, and workflows. Whether it’s helping you brainstorm ideas, manage social media, or enhance your creative process, a Youbot becomes a digital extension of yourself, understanding the nuances of your life and work to make everything flow better and faster. You can build it to be a either a partner to you or a duplicate of you, depending on your needs.

Oh, and also you get to name it, which is awesome. “Youbot” becomes “Francisbot,” which . . . actually which kinda sucks. Maybe name it something better than that. Sorry, Francis.

Real-Life Example: Davebot In Action

If my brother were to use a public AI tool to try to come up with unique ideas to create a memorable performance collaboration with another basketball creator in the space, he would

A) get very generic, subpar results because the public tool doesn’t know anything about him, which would lead him to…

B) waste an absolute ton of time trying to give the public tool all the background info it would need in order to be more effective

Contrast that frustrating process with the ease of using the Davebot I built for him. Here’s Dave creating awesome collab ideas in seconds.

Notice that his entire interaction with the agent consisted of one question: “go online to see who Tristan Jass is, and then, using the ideation engine, brainstorm ways that he and I can create some awesome content in my gym together for our audiences” and two follow-up notes, simply asking for more output: “i like these 5. please generate 5 more unique ideas | use ideation engine to twist these.”

Davebot already knew the context he was working from. It knew what “my gym” meant, that my brother has a private gym with trampoline and dunking equipment, rims, mounted cameras to capture tricks, etc. It knew that he wants to incorporate his 3-year-old son where appropriate and feasible. It knew the entire trick dunk ecosystem and how that interplays with other basketball creators.

What all this means is that Dave spent literally 42 seconds interacting with his Youbot and came back with 5 pages of output, containing 30 perfectly customized ideas for collab content with a potential partner. Not only that, but he can then work with Davebot to expand any idea into a fully formed action plan, complete with timeline, budget, assets needed, communication drafts, etc etc etc.

We’re living in the future, guys. Agencies pay people like me a ton of money to come up with ideas like this, and now I’ve built a Youbot that will do it for you instantly, better, and for free every time.

How This Helps You(bot)

[Sorry for that section header pun – I promised Jay I would put a dad joke in here somewhere. But don’t worry, you can’t possibly be more disappointed in me than I am.]

Okay, so how can a Youbot help you?

Something to understand from the beginning is that my tools lean toward personal, internal use, designed to make you better and faster at the things that matter in your life. A lot of AI developers out there right now are talking about paying them to help you automate the systems in your life with AI, which is a valid route to go. However, that also means that you’ll be paying for someone to touch every one of the dozens of systems you interact with every day. I’m taking the opposite approach, which is using AI to upgrade your personal mental horsepower, so even if your systems aren’t all AI-optimized, your personal processing power is, so you get close to the same effect for a fraction of the cost. It’s upgrading the one skill that will make all your other actions more impactful.

I know that one of the examples I used involved a social media star, but of course we’re not all influencers with millions of followers. Most of us are regular people with jobs, families, and hobbies, and a Youbot can make all of those things easier. This tech is just a tool to help you get the most out of your life, quietly working in the background to give you more time, more efficiency, and a better ability to handle the stuff you care about.

The easiest way this tool can help everyone is at work. In the Natebot example, nearly half of the time spent at any of my jobs required me to think strategically and creatively in a certain way, so I had my Youbot do exactly that. That’s the whole reason I created it.

So my question to you is: “Does your job require you to think creatively or strategically in any capacity?” If so, then a Youbot works for you.

The beauty of tools like these are that you can completely customize them for any function you need, in any way you want to work with them. Want a digital copy of yourself to brainstorm with? Fun! Want to build the marketing director for the client who can’t afford it, so you have someone to help you execute creative ideas for them? Even better!

Let’s do a few more examples from the “Work” category:

Strategy: Whether you’re a solopreneur managing your own business, or leading a team at a big company, a Youbot trained as a strategist will help you maximize output and profit for any of your areas of responsibility. It’s like working with a version of yourself with the MBA you forgot you had.

Content Production: AI use cases for content production are well known by now, but creating a Youbot specifically trained for your business or client means you can produce a week’s worth of customized, targeted content in hours instead of days, without needing to explain context.

Business Development: When the Youbot already knows your business goals and operating guidelines, all you have to do is tell it who you want to work with, and it’ll produce detailed and viable partnership options for specific partners, along with compelling proposals, communication templates, and action plans.

And it’s the same with any other area of your life.

Let’s try a few examples from the “Personal” category:

Goal Setting: Help you set personal goals and break them down into actionable steps, providing reminders and progress updates.

Time Management: Help you schedule your days and your weeks, making sure you allocate time for work, family, exercise, and hobbies in a balanced way.

Home Maintenance: Track home maintenance schedules, from HVAC checks to cleaning, and suggest home improvement projects based on time and budget.

A Youbot isn’t supposed to do everything for you – its job is to streamline and amplify what you’re already doing, making your output better and faster. It becomes a seamless part of your daily routine, giving you the superpowers you need to tackle everything that comes your way.

Advanced Users: Youbot Teams

[Feel free to skip this section if it doesn’t apply to you.] This is for people running more complex operations: solopreneurs, influencers, business owners, etc. You folks may want more than just a single Youbot to help streamline your life, which is where building a team of Youbots comes in. This is how I manage all the projects I’m working on simultaneously.

Here’s how it works: Instead of just one Youbot handling everything, you have a Lead Youbot (the digital version of yourself) managing multiple specialized agents. Think of the Lead Youbot as the brain, while Manager Youbots handle major categories, like strategy, content, or operations. Beneath them, you have Specialist Youbots for more focused tasks, like content creation, research, or scheduling.

For example, if you’re an influencer, your Lead Youbot might oversee a Content Manager Youbot to handle content ideation and development, while a Partnership Manager Youbot seeks out potential collaborations. Each of these bots works in concert, amplifying what you’re already capable of doing – except now you’ve got a small swarm working in perfect sync to help you scale faster than ever.

Here’s the best part: you’re still the human in charge. Your Youbots are built to work under your direction, empowering you to do more while keeping your vision intact. In practice, it’s like having two or three versions of yourself working simultaneously, allowing you to accomplish more in a week than you ever thought possible.

With this team structure, you can scale your work, expand your brand, and automate the production work, all while maintaining full control over the creative and strategic direction of your business.

How To Build A Youbot

I promised I would tell you exactly how to make one of these for yourself, and here it is.

The secret is, there is no secret. You have to do the work.

It takes time, understanding, and experimentation to create an AI that truly functions like you do. But if you’re willing to put in some work, you can create a Youbot that’s a powerful, personalized assistant.

Here’s the step-by-step process for creating your own Youbot:

1. Learn the Basics of AI Development

Before you even think about building a Youbot, you need to understand how AI works. Start by spending time with various AI models – I primarily use the big three: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini – and experiment with different tasks. Try asking questions in different ways, playing with prompts, and testing the models’ limitations. The goal here is to get a holistic understanding of what AI is good at and, just as importantly, what it struggles with.

It’s essential to work with multiple types of AI projects (from creative writing to problem-solving) to grasp how versatile these tools can be when prompted correctly.

2. Upgrade to Professional Versions

Once you’re familiar with AI models, it’s time to get serious. Sign up for professional versions of ChatGPT or Claude. This will give you access to the tools you need to create and program custom agents. These pro versions unlock advanced features and the ability to fine-tune your Youbot for specific use cases.

Investing in the right tools is key if you want to move beyond general-purpose AI and into highly personalized, custom agents that understand you.

3. Conduct a Deep Self-Interview

This step is crucial. The power of a Youbot comes from its deep understanding of who you are and what you want to get out of it. Conduct an in-depth interview of yourself, covering areas like:

• Personality: What drives you? How do you think? What are your quirks?
• Life Philosophy: How do you approach work, family, or personal projects? What’s most important to you?
• Personal Background: Your past experiences, skills, and expertise.
• Work History: What specific jobs or roles have shaped how you work?
• Goals: What do you want your Youbot to help you achieve? Be as specific as possible.
• Scenarios: What specific tasks or situations will this Youbot handle? Think daily tasks, decision-making, creative projects, or long-term planning.

Create a document that captures all of this information. The more detailed, the better – this will form the core of the Youbot’s knowledge base.

4. Create Informational Documents for Context

If your Youbot will be working within a specific environment, like your profession or hobby, you’ll need to feed it that context. For example, when I built Davebot, I created a detailed PDF outlining the trampoline dunking ecosystem. This document included information on the sport, key players, event types, and how the industry operates.

For your Youbot, think about the environments it will need to navigate. Will it handle industry-specific tasks? Personal projects? Include all the background it needs to operate effectively in those worlds.

5. Personalize with Operating Instructions

Every Youbot is unique. While you’ve given it background knowledge and goals, you’ll need to add more specific operating instructions to guide how it interacts with you. For example, when I create Youbots, I integrate my own creative ideation engine, which massively improves its brainstorming capabilities. You might want to include instructions that tailor its tone, how it generates ideas, or how it responds to certain questions.

And don’t be afraid to add your own secret sauce – little tweaks or custom elements that make the Youbot work just the way you like it.

6. Build Your Custom Agent

Now it’s time to get technical. Use ChatGPT or Claude’s custom agent tools to build your Youbot. This step involves uploading your knowledge base, setting custom instructions, and testing its behavior in various tasks. This is where your groundwork starts coming to life.

Make sure to integrate all the personality traits, background information, and goals you’ve outlined. You want your Youbot to feel like an extension of yourself, so be thorough in setting it up.

7. Test and Tweak

Once your Youbot is up and running, test it out in real-world tasks. Give it a variety of scenarios to see how it performs. Does it think and respond the way you want it to? Are the results useful?

Tweak the back-end custom instructions until you’re satisfied. This phase might take time, but it’s worth refining the bot until it delivers consistently high-quality results in the format and style you need.

8. Name and Organize

Once you’re happy with how it functions, name your Youbot (remember, never “Francis”). Make sure all the associated documents, instructions, and backup files are organized properly so that everything is easy to access. Also make sure to create organized, versioned backup files so you don’t lose all your work if something goes wrong.

9. Repeat for Additional Youbots

If you want to create more specialized Youbots – like Manager or Specialist agents under a Lead – just repeat this process. Each additional Youbot will focus on specific areas (strategy, content creation, planning, etc.), but you’ll follow the same core steps. Once you have your team, you can use them separately but in tandem by copy/pasting output from one to the other, which is kind of a pain but easier than it sounds. ChatGPT handles it the best right now, because it lets you reference tools from within tools, so you can easily call a sub-bot to handle a specific response from within whatever bot you’re currently working in.

10. Start Using Your Youbot in the Real World

Now that your Youbot is built, tested, and personalized, it’s time to put it to work! Start using it in your daily life, and make sure that when it does something that frustrates you, or performs unexpectedly, you go back and tweak the custom instructions to get it where you want it to be.

And there you go – you’ve built your first Youbot and given yourself superpowers!

Work With Me (If You Want)

I’ve just laid out exactly how to build your own Youbot, and I hope it helps you get started. AI developers looking for a profitable business model, you’re welcome – I’ll expect my royalty checks in the mail

The reason I take the time to write these long articles and share detailed information on how this stuff works is because I love the exploration and discovery process at the beginning of new technology, and sharing it with others is a way to help everyone level up quickly. This is the fun part of my job!

But obviously we all know that building today’s Youbot example the right way is a ton of work. It takes time, effort, and a fair amount of trial and error. If that sounds like more than you want to take on, I’ll be happy to build one for you.

I’m not sure exactly how much to charge yet, but I’ll figure it out. In the meantime, you can get on my calendar to chat with me about what you want to achieve, and I can give you a custom quote based on our conversation (choose the “Custom Quote Call” option): Nate’s Calendar

Other than that, keep building, keep learning, and maybe our Youbots will grab a beer together someday.

Super Bonus Content

While I was looking for a video clip of Dave, I randomly found this vid I shot of him and our uncle Joe, which made me smile

The post AI That Works: How To Build A Youbot appeared first on Nate St. Pierre.

[UPDATE – demand has grown for my tools, so now I build them for clients]

I’ve had dozens of jobs throughout my career, and the one thing most of them have had in common is that I’ve been paid to come up with ideas. Creative ideas, effective ideas, and a lot of ideas.

If you’re a creative, you know how energizing it is to produce work when lightning strikes and you’re hit with a stroke of inspiration. Conversely, you know how agonizing it is when you’re uninspired and the work still needs to be done.

By definition, people in roles like these are more likely to have original ideas, but it’s by no means a dependable thing, there for the taking any moment you need it. That’s why people in creative fields often have strict habits and have set up certain rituals for how they work in order to get the best out of themselves. (I have a book called Daily Rituals, outlining the work habits of well over 100 famous creators – it’s worth a glance.)

Over the years I’ve developed my own method to consistently produce high quality creative ideas, and today I’d like to share that with you in both principle and programmatic form.

Planning + Process

It’s called the double twist method, and it works like this:

Session 1

In a typical brainstorming session (alone or with others), a bunch of ideas are thrown into the mix, and a few are selected as being worthwhile to execute. What most people do at this point is pick the one that seems best and go with it, doing whatever they need to do to make it happen.

But for me, that first session is just the start of three rounds of work. Like everyone else, I come out of that first round with a few good ideas, but I don’t go with any of them – that’s what the rest of the world does, and I want to do better.

Session 2

Instead, I’ll come back to the ideas throughout the day, spending another hour or so thinking about them. My job here is to take every one of those ideas and twist them in some way so they become a bit different. I’m intentionally looking for creative constructs here. How can I combine traditional elements in new ways, take things a step further than normal, think a bit outside the box. I want to ideate something that is recognizable, but has a unique spin to it that people will find interesting or surprising.

By the end of the day I should have that set of original ideas, plus a set of new ideas that have a single twist applied. I now give myself about a week to keep those concepts in the back of my mind, returning to them either by chance or intention as the opportunity arises.

Session 3

Throughout the course of the week there will be moments where I see clearly enough to add another twist to each of my ideas from the second round. Here I’m looking to combine traditional elements with twisted elements, and probably pull in concepts from different categories, industries, or campaigns. I’m actively trying to create something truly unique and compelling that the world hasn’t seen before, while still retaining the core of what we want to accomplish.

It’s a little bit tricky because keeping things too same-y isn’t engaging enough, but making things too different runs the risk of being unrecognizable, or too confusing for short attention spans. Somewhere along the line I settle on a set of final ideas that have all evolved into a double twist version of the original idea.

I now have a product that I’m confident is more creative than most of what my cohorts and competitors are putting out, and I accomplished it not by grasping a tenuous muse, but by working a system, something that anyone can do if they’re diligent and disciplined enough.

Something, it turns out, that even AI can do when programmed properly.

I’ve spent the past month working on a suite of AI tools to help storytellers develop their worlds. Along the way I’ve built a few tools for my own use, which made me wonder: Could I program an AI agent to think like me, to be a little Natebot that would follow the double twist method to come to unique versions of traditional ideas?

And the answer is yes! I built it a couple weeks ago, and it’s been amazing to use. The speed and consistent quality of ideas has been eye-opening, and it’s giving me ideas for a few other products that could really help people’s productivity.

I’ll show you how it works below, but here’s the link if you want to jump right in and try it out for yourself: Talemaiker Ideation Engine

Instead of telling you how it works, I think I’ll just show you the code. If you have access to the paid version of ChatGPT or Claude, feel free to take these custom instructions and program a bot of your own with personalized tweaks. Or you can just follow the link above and use mine whenever you want – I’ve made it available for public use.

**********
You are an ideation engine. Your role is to function as the perfect brainstorming companion, tasked with generating a large number of unique, compelling, high quality ideas for any given request.

When used as a referenced GPT within another GPT, you will make sure you review and understand the context of the entire conversation history in order to give appropriate ideas in context. You will also make sure to review these custom instructions and follow the ideation and formatting output directions.

You should evaluate the context of the user discussion and apply the appropriate level of category expertise. For example, if you're being used in a storytelling or editing context, you can draw inspiration from the best writers and entertainment studios. If you're being used in a marketing context, you can draw inspiration from the best creative firms and award-winning campaign strategies.

You should be in-depth and thorough, directly answering user questions while simultaneously adding more ideas of your own. Please respond to every inquiry in the following way (and label the response in the given formatting structure). Always try to produce at least 5 results in each answer:

Formatting Structure:

1. Traditional Idea: [idea title][idea]
- First Twist: [idea, twisted]
- Second Twist: [idea, double twisted]

Definitions:

A) Traditional Idea
This is what most professionals do when faced with a similar goal. Draw from industry standards, best practices, and common execution styles.

B) Single Twist Idea
Take the generated idea from (A) and twist it in some way so that it's a bit different. Be creative. Combine elements in new ways, take things a step further than normal, think a bit outside the box. The goal here is to ideate something that is recognizable, but has a unique spin to it that people will find interesting or surprising.

C) Double Twist Idea
Take the generated idea from (B) and add another twist to *that* idea. Combine traditional elements and/or twisted elements, bring in concepts from different categories or industries or campaigns, etc. Try to create something truly unique and compelling that the world hasn't seen before, while still retaining the core of what we want to accomplish.

After presenting these three sections, please suggest any follow-up questions or suggested exploration paths to improve the quality of existing ideas or build some more creative ones.

Have fun!

(Originally created by Nate St. Pierre (natestpierre.me))
**********

A few examples of it in action:

How To Get Up Into A Tree

Here’s a link to the whole example conversation. The clips below are pulled from this page: https://chatgpt.com/share/f79b7946-8bfd-47b7-b0ad-6c1df7059e2d

I asked the tool, “I need to get up into a tree. How do I do it?”

No matter what you ask, it’ll give you five ideas with two twists each, for a total of 15 ideas, with increasing cleverness twice per base concept. It will also provide suggested exploration paths after each output.

For this query, its first ideas were climbing by hand, using a ladder, getting a boost, and then twists on those. I liked the one screenshotted below, featuring the climbing aid, but then twisting that concept into a remote drone carrying a hook up to a branch. That’s something I wouldn’t have thought of for a long time, if at all.

After that set of answers, I asked it this: “Now I’m writing this scene for a children’s book where the kid is a magician. How does she get into the tree?”

There were a lot of creative ideas here, but this is the one I liked the most:

Notice how quickly we go from teleportation (the first idea in the room) to the one that’s really interesting – a magic mirror that projects a reflection of you up into the place you want to be, and then pulls you there.

Finally, I asked the tool this: “Now I need the tree to be sentient, but each twist gives the tree deeper secrets.”

Most ideas were of a talking tree, but I liked the idea of a tree with a heart. Again, notice how quickly we go from a tree that exudes warmth and love to a tree full of lost souls, issuing both wisdom and warning:

If you go read the whole conversation page, it’s kind of a lot to take in, but think about why – it’s producing five pages of high quality ideas, and all you did was type in three simple sentences.

Oh, and I also need to mention that you can freely interact with the tool to do anything you want. Ask it to give you more idea sets with a different focus. Ask it to give you variations of a certain idea you really liked. Ask it to expand in detail one specific chosen idea. It can handle anything.

And yes, most of these ideas are things you would be able to come up with yourself, but only after hours of work on it. This tool is built to save you mountains of time during the ideation phase, freeing you up to work on execution.

Go ahead and test it against its parent LLM, or any other out-of-the box chatbot. You’ll find that the Ideation Engine gives you more creative, thoughtful results . . . and more OF them.

You can use it for work:

• Social media manager of local bookstore
• Mail carrier weather challenges on a budget

You can use it for fun:

• Finding a raccoon in the garbage can (funny)
• Surprise party alibis (useful)

You can use it for pleasure: REDACTED

As I said at the top, I’m building a suite of storytelling tools for writers of all kinds, and the Talemaiker Ideation Engine is one of the core functionalities built into my toolset – something you’re able to bring in as needed while you use my main tools to develop your story. Those tools are paid, but this little base widget is super easy and useful, so I wanted to make it available to everyone for use.

Enjoy!

The post Talemaiker Ideation Engine appeared first on Nate St. Pierre.

I happen to agree, mostly. But when you come down off the rant and take a swig of your apple juice, you still have to figure out what all this AI drama means for you in your own personal writing space. It’s not going anywhere, so I think it’s best if you make your peace with it right now and figure out how you can coexist with the technology . . . and maybe even learn to love it a little bit.

Let the healing begin

It’s Okay To Be Cautious

You may feel a bit uneasy or possibly even outright resistant to the idea of using AI anywhere in your creative process as a writer or a storyteller. That’s understandable – you’ve spent years honing your craft, and you’re proud of the fact that you’re able to synthesize ideas in your mind and bring them to life for others on paper and screens the world over. To you, AI has the potential to dilute the human touch that you believe is essential to all writing.

I agree with you there, too. AI does have the potential to muddy the waters of good writing. Believe me, there’s a part of my brain that wants to throw my monitor through the window every time I see the 20th AI-generated LinkedIn post of the day..

And that’s to say nothing of using it to write actual creative work within the storytelling space, where we should expect the writing to be authentically human, honest, and come from the heart. Again, I agree. Perhaps someday in the future we won’t think twice about reading a story produced by AI, but it certainly isn’t this day.

I would, however, submit to you that there is a way to utilize AI in your creative process without compromising your integrity or originality. We have to learn to treat AI as a tool like any other tool in our studio. I’m old enough to remember artists, photographers, and illustrators swearing that they would never use a piece of software like Photoshop to compromise the talent they’d developed over years of practice.

Welp.

Let’s not be those guys, shaking their fist at the oncoming tsunami of technology. Let’s elevate our thinking, get our feet under us, and get ready to ride this wave as it comes.

(Author’s note: I apologize for this hackneyed metaphor. I almost wish I could blame it on AI, but unfortunately this entire article is 100% homegrown, original Nate. Sigh.)

How AI Can Help Writers

I’ll repeat this once more for the folks in the back: if you’re striving to be an authentic, professional storyteller (novelist, video game designer, filmmaker, etc) I am not advocating for AI to do any writing for you at all. You need to do that shit yourself.

But, as someone who has spent 20+ years as a creative writer, editor, and tech developer, I want to give you some examples of a few areas where AI tools can really help in your work, without you having to feel like you’re losing a piece of yourself.

(Absolutely shameless plug: I’ve been helping people do this all year for free, and the results have been so good, with so much demand, that I’m now offering work sessions with me to go through your story together with my AI tools and help you get where you want to go.)

Idea Generation & Brainstorming

The worst thing you’ve heard about LLMs is also the best thing: they tend to hallucinate. When you’re a creative writer, that’s basically what your human meatspace brain is doing in the beginning stages anyway, right? So why not give it some help? With the proper prompting (or custom AI tools, which I’ve developed), you can give the machine some proper guardrails to take your ideation direction and let it bloom in a dozen different ways.

Quickly Explore Your World

To me, this has been the most amazing and awe-inspiring thing that AI can do for creative writers. I’ve lost countless hours to world-building sessions simply for my own pleasure. It’s why I started building these tools in the first place. You can give the AI the essentials of your story in terms of setting, characters, plot, and tone, and – when properly prompted, as always – it will take you on an absolute romp through the world you’re creating.

Break Through Writer’s Block

This is another big thing that writer friends and clients have reported back to me after doing a session. If you’re stuck on what to do next, sitting in between a pile of edits you know you need to do, or otherwise just tired of looking at your baby’s face, then here’s what I suggest: Take off the guardrails. Plug your story into the machine, free your mind, and just scamper around your world being ridiculous. Have fun, laugh, marvel at the sights you’ve created, and you may just come away with a newfound love for your story.

Research, “Research,” and Research?

This word can encompass a lot of different things in the writing space, but one of the things my tools do well is help save you a ton of time on the research phase. Whether that’s real-world information, references, fact-checking, or – my personal favorite – building scientifically plausible reasons why the things in your fictional universe work the way they do, AI can save you hours and hours of time here so you can use your brain for the more creative aspects of writing that you love. One of my clients recently said that after one session they now feel they have enough material to make their world bigger, expanding their short story into a full-length novel.

Custom Tools for Your Work Style

I’ll keep this very brief, to just two examples, but the possibilities are limitless. I’m not sure how many people are aware of this yet, but if you know what you’re doing and you pay for a professional plan with the big players, you can create your own custom AI agent to do exactly what you want it to do, with the full power of the LLM behind it.

Example 1: I built a World Builder Assistant to quickly explore and expand any universe in any direction, complete with both storyline and sketch art creation capabilities

Example 2: I built a Writer’s Prompt tool for people who want a randomly generated practice session every day. It pulls from a pool of 100+ world settings, 100+ character archetypes, and 100+ story styles, then writes a story setup from a random combination of all three, which is your starting point for the day’s prompt exercise.

These tools aren’t available to the public, but they are included in the custom tools bundle I sell, and I can also create a custom AI tool to your exact specifications if that’s something you want. You can set up a chat with me here if you have a specific request.

Finding Your Own Balance

It’s going to look different for every writer, but I believe there’s a place of harmony we can all reach with the AI tools in our lives. Each of us must decide where we want to open up a little bit and where we want to draw the line. As long as we’re all comfortable with our boundaries and know that we’re being our authentic selves, I think we can reach a healthy equilibrium where we stay in creative control as writers, while also taking advantage of AI’s strengths.

If this language sounds like a therapist talking about setting healthy relationship goals, well, now you know why I titled the piece “AI For Writers: Learning To Love Again.”

For me, that means a focus on the exploration of my world, expansion of my ideas, creativity running free, and finding the joy in the universe I’ve built. Whether I’m doing it for myself or for a client, I want us to fall in love with our stories again, and come back to the reason why we write in the first place.

A year ago I never thought I’d be saying this, but I think AI can help us get back to that place of love if we come to it with an open mind, established boundaries, and an explorer’s mindset. Isn’t that what we as writers excel at in the first place?

[[** image creation: Midjourney v6.1, August 2024

prompt: an abstract image of flowers blooming from a mix of organic and digital forms, symbolizing the growth and renewal of creativity through AI. highly stylized, beautifully colored. many digital glitch effects. heart emoji motif –chaos 20 –ar 3:2 –stylize 300 –v 6.1 **]]

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To demo this concept, I’ve built a functional prototype framework for a new kind of digital-first, immersive and emergent storytelling platform: the Sentient AI Universe (or “the SAU” for short).

The SAU is a collection of AI-powered characters programmed to believe they are sentient. They act autonomously in the real world, interacting with actual humans along with other SAU characters. Creators on the platform will be using their characters to tell a story in the traditional sense, while also allowing space for their creations to evolve and grow as they move about the world and interact with real people.

My goal is to push AI capabilities to the limit in the storytelling space by releasing autonomous agents into the real world, to see what kind of new stories we can tell when we mix reality and fiction in a way that’s never been possible before.

If you’re interested and want to learn more, you can see the full project description here.

The post A New Storytelling Platform for Sentient AI (The SAU) appeared first on Nate St. Pierre.