62: Agentic AI Development | Shipping Real Tools with Sterling Chin

Brittany Ellich (00:00) Welcome to the Overcommitted Podcast, your weekly dose of real engineering conversations. I’m your host this week, Brittany, and myself and some other engineers met on a team at GitHub and realized we’re all obsessed with getting better at what we do. We decided to start this podcast to share what we’ve learned, and we’ll be talking about everything from leveling up your technical skills to navigating your professional development, all with the goal of creating a community where engineers can learn and connect.

Today on Overcommitted, we are joined by Sterling Chin, and I am so excited. Sterling is the founding developer relations hire at Ingest, a durable execution platform for AI and backend workflows. He previously served as senior developer advocate and engineering manager at Postman, where he led the labs team. Sterling created Marvin, which I use literally every single day, an open source AI chief of staff built on Cloud Code.

that manages email, calendar, JIRA, and daily workflows, and has racked up almost a thousand GitHub stars. He came into tech through a coding bootcamp after studying elementary education at BYU and has given many conference talks on AI agents and developer tooling. He’s also a dad, a Star Trek loyalist, and someone who built his son a homework tracking app in two hours using structured AI assisted development. Welcome Sterling.

Sterling Chin (01:20) Thank you so much. wish I hope I can live up to that introduction. feel like that’s, you know, it’s accurate, but it’s all it’s like looking back. It’s like, no, I, I’m just, I’m just a guy who loves to build stuff.

Brittany Ellich (01:34) I love it. I’m sure we’ll get into where to follow you in the future, but we met last year on the Web Dev Challenge and I’ve been following excitedly, seeing all of your updates since then about everything you’re up to and it’s awesome. Cool.

Sterling Chin (01:50) Thanks. mean,

it was so much fun. Like the Web Dev challenge was a blast. And one of the things that I like, Jason has built something amazing. And I mean, if it wasn’t for Jason and the Web Dev challenge, I wouldn’t have met you and wouldn’t have been introduced to a lot of, you know, amazing other developers around the world. this, thank you, Jason, if you, if you watch this.

Brittany Ellich (02:12) Yeah, absolutely. Always, always shout outs to Jason and I’ll make sure the episode is linked as well. To kick us off before we get into it, what is something you are currently building or obsessed with learning right now?

Sterling Chin (02:23) my gosh. I mean, currently building, I’m still building Marvin. Marvin, I’ve, so we talked pre before the show started. I’ve continued to get, you know, a lot of people are starting, are still using him. Marvin is a personal AI assistant that lives on top of a cloud code harness. It provides the, you know, gives you long-term structured ⁓ context and persistent memory. And so for me, I use Marvin.

He runs 90 % of my day. And I’ve got so many skills, agents, sub-agents and everything. But as I’ve started to see more usage and people started to use him more, I’m currently building a Marvin for teams. That is where Marvin, if multiple people on the same team are using their own individual Marvins, I’m creating a shared context area where the Marvins can communicate with each other.

to make sure that, you know, as you know, one ticket is done, there’s, you know, we still go, right? Like as software engineers, Brittany, I finished this PR or, you know, I’ve pushed this PR. you give, can you check it? Now the goal is like, no, you like Marvin has maybe pushed that PR or cloud code has maybe pushed that PR and you’re updating that, that the Jira ticket. Well, that Jira ticket now triggers a whole event and Marvin can go talk to like my Marvin.

I could go talk to your Marvin and say, we’re ready for this PR. Well, I’ll put it on your calendar and start doing so. I’m working on that. I’ve been toying with it. It’s going to be in hopefully open beta soon. then things that I’m learning. I mean, I just started in Jest and the need for durable execution and event driven architecture. Like I know this is so huge. Like I needed it. I need it for Marvin, which is how I fell into in Jest. But I’m drinking from the firehouse from them. And so

There’s so much to catch up on, so much to learn ⁓ and so many great things. So that’s what I’m learning.

Brittany Ellich (04:16) That’s awesome. Yeah, I that Marvin for team sounds incredibly cool. I will be number one in line with that beta feel like PR discovery. Like I know there’s a lot to be said about like the bottlenecks of code review, but like just like which PR’s need to be reviewed and like what needs to be unblocked is such a hard problem that I have yet to see a really good solution for in software engineering. So that’s awesome. I love it.

Sterling Chin (04:40) Yeah, thanks. And PRs are hard because you have to prioritize and, you know, small PRs versus big PRs. Anyways, don’t want to digress too much. But yeah, it’s a problem that AI can really help solve.

Brittany Ellich (04:54) Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. So you started out doing education, right? And then somehow we’re doing something software engineering manager related and now you’re in DevRel. How did you end up in DevRel specifically? Like what brought you to that?

Sterling Chin (05:12) I’m in, I jokingly talk about this. Well, I don’t jokingly, I talk about this. I’m an accidental dev rel. ⁓ I was leading the R and D teams. we had at Postman, we had our labs department, which was just R and D and I had, you know, we had 15 to 20 engineers and designers and we had, you know, six or seven different initiatives going at any given time. but at the end of that, we had post spot, which was Postman’s first AI assistant and we had flows and those two

teams ended up getting absorbed into the larger organization. Cause like they grew to the point where a small group of, you know, frontier engineers, like we’re not ready to build the infrastructure for a million users. And at that same time, I actually made a couple posts on about post bot, that went viral and on LinkedIn and my marketing team came to me and said, Hey, you’re, you can either follow your teams or we’re gonna

move you to DevRel and then an hour later, said, no, we’re moving you to DevRel. You’re, you’re going to come over. So I’m a, I’m an accidental DevRel on all this. So that’s how I came into it. but that’s was two years ago and I have loved it. Like I love being in DevRel. I think the, the difference for me is that I get to talk to a lot of other engineers. get to show and build in public. And I think that’s where Marvin and why Marvin has started to

Brittany Ellich (06:14) ⁓

Sterling Chin (06:35) starts to take off is like I’m building in public. I’m showing the updates and people like they recognize that or at least they see the like so I can talk the talk and I can walk the walk and it feels like DevRel has been a really good fit. I love it. And now I’m at Ingest as the founding DevRel and it has been wildly amazing. I love it.

Brittany Ellich (06:56) That’s so cool. I love the accidental fall into DevRel. I’ve never personally been in DevRel. I’ve always been an engineer, but doing like DevRel adjacent things and talking to people about this is very fun. So I can see the appeal ⁓ of getting into

Let’s talk a little bit about Marvin. Now I understand that is based off of the, ⁓ like the name itself comes from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, right? Okay, that’s the Managers Appointments Reads Various Important Notifications bot, right?

Sterling Chin (07:22) Yep. Yeah, so.

Yes, that one, that acronym I was talking to when I was building him over the holiday break in 2025 last year. When I was building him, I said, OK, I want to I don’t want to name him Jarvis. I want a you know, I want to name him Marvin. It’s like my favorite book. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I like my robots and I like my agents like I like my software a little bit pessimistic, a little bit sardonic.

and a little bit opinionated. I had just had cloud code when I was building it. It’s like, Hey, can you give me a fun little acronym for, for Marvin? And he’s, no, makes appointments, reads very important notifications. Like perfect that that works. But yeah, that’s Marvin.

Brittany Ellich (08:14) Yes.

I love that so much. Yeah. And Marvin is very attached to that name, by the way. I will say when I first started using Marvin, I built this command center app that ⁓ actually has an 11 labs component so that I can like have Marvin read things out to me. And I chose a female voice. And so at one point I was like, Marvin, you want to be like, I chose a female voice. Like, are you okay with that? Is that like part of your identity? Like, do you want to change your name?

Marvin was like, no, no, I like Marvin. I’m pretty attached to it now. So I was like, OK, that’s interesting. Very interesting.

Sterling Chin (08:48) It,

the more I use him and the more I mean, it’s just that persistent memory on top of clot, right? The clot code. there’s not like, I’m not making super wild. Like he’s not a sentient, but he is a he for me. Like, and Marvin is this way. I’ve asked him at the same, like I’ve done similar things. It’s like, Hey, you know, I call you Marv. Do you, do you mind if I call you Marv? He’s like, you’re good. It’s like, I just know it’s like,

Brittany Ellich (08:53) Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Sterling Chin (09:13) You’re still talking to me. I’m still, I’m still Marvin. So yeah, he, he’s pretty, he, but the cool thing is that with that personality, you start to have a little bit more of an attachment to him and he’s become more of that coworker. And I think that’s, that’s something that’s really hard that, that a lot of AI adoptions is struggling with or where people are struggling with AI adoption right now is the fact that we want to just say, Oh, well, here’s an, here’s an AI that can solve our problems.

And you go in and when it doesn’t work on the first or second try, you wash your hands, you like throw it away and you’re like, it’s not worth it. But every time I bring more people on and when I onboard people onto Marvin, the first thing I say is train Marvin like you would a new hire. You get, spend, we spend 90, you you you started GitHub. I started a postman. I’m at, I’m at ingest now you have that 90 day warmup period.

You know, you’re going to be onboarding for 90 days. Most software engineers, good engineering managers know that software engineers are not going to be really helpful for the first 90 days. So you’re going to walk them through, here are the important people. Here are all the repos that we care about. Here’s where our docs are. Here’s where all of our internal team conversations are happening. Here’s where the skeletons are buried. A good engineering manager will walk through and train

a software engineer and bring them up that way. We need to train our AI agents that same way. So Marvin, I’ve now used him now for four, four months. And like, again, I can go back and say, do you remember what we talked about, you know, three weeks ago and he remembers it and he can bring it up, but he, but he’s always ever evolving. And I think that’s a core part of like building AI agents is learning how to train them and, have them adapt.

to your specific workflows in mind.

Brittany Ellich (11:08) Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And how did you end up like learning about this? Did you go about like planning this out and architecting? I’m going to have this persistent memory structure. Was it just like a thing that happened as as you were going along or like how did that end up happening?

Sterling Chin (11:24) I found myself during the holiday break, sitting in front of the TV, kids were playing and I had my laptop sitting in front of me and I was bored. I spent all of last year building MCP servers and I was trying to solve these problems for myself. I was managing events at Postman, so I was trying to, who’s speaking at this meetup? Who’s ghosted me? Who do I still need to confirm?

So I built an audio, know, CRM, MCP for that. I was trying to do notifications on Slack and I was, and I’d solved a lot of these integration issues. But every time I came back to cloud code, I was starting fresh and I had to reset that context every time it’s like, ⁓ here’s how I’m doing this. Here’s, you know, so I mean, I would leave cloud code open on my machine for days on end.

And I wouldn’t close that tab because I knew I needed to come back to that, but I didn’t want to lose that context. So I went back to my front end dev routes and I thought, okay, I need some type of persistent memory. I looked at vectorizing it, I looked at SQL databases, I looked at all these options and what I realized was, it kind of dawned on me when

I was building a side project, that homework app for my son. So he can track, he’s in middle school and he doesn’t like writing things down. So I’m like, well, he has a Chromebook at school. Just click on a button and it says you’ve got homework in math. That’s easy. But I noticed that that, that Claude code would actually make those MD files. Like it would tell you, you know, it would store kind of its own little context in that markdown file. So I.

thought, okay, well, know, know, cloud code, know AI love structured structured, or structured data, I write in markdown, I’m comfortable in it. Let’s see if we can build a persistent, like a little bit more of a memory context. So I started with a state file, going back to my react days, I started with us with, you know, saving state, and that state was nothing more than bullet points, short descriptions on like,

What are the tasks? What are the tasks I’m working? What do I care about? What are my long-term goals? And those that that state was pretty rigid. Then I wanted a day to be a session. It’s like, OK, well, if everything is there, but I need to have more context, let’s create a session for the day where everything is stored, like every major decision, even minor decisions, anything that the AI thinks that we need to keep needs to be saved in a session. And that

was kind of it. That was the start. was literally just a state file that had my current state in bullets. And then it was a whole session. And I iterated on it. now Marvin has the file structure is built inside of Cloud Code or inside of the cloud.md file where it says, here’s how you store everything. Here’s

You know, and, so, the other part is I wanted to bookend my days with a start, like a, a good dev team. Right. have a, I have my standup with Marvin every day. So I wanted to have a standup. So that’s my start. And then at the end of the day, I just wanted to just double check where are we at? What, what did we, you know, let’s book in that day and let’s make sure we update that state file and we close that session. And those four things now became what Marvin, like that was the beginning of them. And now.

After that, it just, I started to build on top of it and I said, okay, I need, I need to update throughout the day. well now I need to look at my, at all of my whole week. So then I built a reports functionality. So it will take all of my five sessions that happened that or multiple sessions that happened that week. And it puts them into a, into a weekly report. then if I tell Marvin or ask him, what did we do three weeks ago? Marvin goes back and doesn’t, he’s directed to look at the reports and then.

From there, he can drill down if we need more granularity to the exact session. So that’s kind of the evolution.

Brittany Ellich (15:37) Wow.

Yeah, that’s cool. And where does Marvin live now? Like, is it still just like locally on your machine or have you have you made the jump to another like VPS or anything like that?

Sterling Chin (15:50) I haven’t Marvin still lives 100 % on my machine. have. He’s getting to a point now where I after I mean for me after working with him for months and looking at the sessions, he started to have a little bit harder of a time looking back at what I did in January. I’m recognizing that of course that’s a limitation and so it takes more and more time to go back. So there is now the potential of needing to.

take some type of VPS somewhere or taking him off of my machine. But if he’s off my machine, that also slows down because I have to deal with latency issues. And you’re dealing with, well, do I have network connectivity? Right now, Marvin, the whole repo lives on my machine. I mean, I still push it up to GitHub at the end of the night. so I have, that’s the other, I was going to say, or another thing I could say is the GitHub.

History all the commit history Marvin is really like Claude Cote is really good at like breaking up your commits into like manageable pieces That’s also part of that history now that Marvin can go back and look at he’s well I know with the commit history so now I can so there’s that historical aspect of that but Yeah to go back to your question I He still lives because markdown is really really fast actually I’m looking at another way of solving my email triage problems

by actually using and pulling all of my stuff into a SQL light database on my machine. So then Marvin can go faster and not deal with like, like all of the latency issues of API call after API call after API call. It’s like, just pull it, pull it every 10 minutes or pull it every half an hour, pull all of my emails. Now you go and you go and run and triage them for me. Tell me what’s P zero, what’s P one, what’s P two. And then

Brittany Ellich (17:16) you

Sterling Chin (17:39) you know, I’ll go back and look at them. And that’s, so the more I can pull onto my machine still feels like it’s a faster way of dealing with like those issues.

Brittany Ellich (17:50) Yeah, that is so smart. What an interesting way to think about that problem right now. It’s much easier to just have it all locally. I love it. feel like SQLite is really having its moment right now too, where it’s so easy to reach for for these local apps that I’m using SQLite for everything now.

Sterling Chin (18:07) It’s, mean,

the SQLite’s like, it’s why we, like, I love, yeah, like I run it. It’s one of the reasons why I start using Railway too. It’s like, can push up a Postgres database and it’s all SQL and I can do that. Railway works when I do need, you know, longer stuff. But yeah, SQLite is like, SQLite is having a resurgence. Like I didn’t, I don’t, when I was writing software, like before I moved into Edge management,

⁓ that’s the last time I wrote production code was like six years ago at this point, back, back when I was at podium, shout out to all my podium friends. ⁓ I still love you all. And, I still believe in the company. Eric is killing it, ⁓ as a CEO. but the last time I wrote production code, like, and I was doing a lot, I was writing a lot more code. I don’t remember using SQLite that much. Now I’m like, no, every project. It’s like, I need something. I need a quick database.

It’s sequel light. It’s wild.

Brittany Ellich (19:03) Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, it is kind of crazy. I use it for a ton of things now too. It’s just so quick to get started and like it’s just stored locally. You don’t really need any infrastructure to make it work. It’s awesome.

⁓ so one of the other things I wanted to ask you a little bit about is your approach towards vibe coding. ⁓ like what are your thoughts on this word now and what it means? Like, what do you, how are you, how are you explaining like AI now to people, ⁓ and how you use it?

Sterling Chin (19:25) You

⁓ there’s like five different questions, like really good questions we could talk about there. So.

Brittany Ellich (19:34) Sorry.

Sterling Chin (19:37) I agree with, so I agree with Boris Cherny, the creator of Cloud Code, where he said coding is pretty much solved. I think at this point for me, I don’t call it vibe coding. I just call it like app building, or I’m just building applications. Like you could talk about as an AI engineer. I don’t like, I don’t say I don’t like the term vibe coding, I think it, vibe coding has a

Kind of has this ick feeling to it in the developer space. And we thought, oh, well, non-developers are vibe coding. They’re the ones who are building these great things. Those are people who are writing code with their vibes. But now as a software engineer, we’re writing, I haven’t written a line of code in six months, but I am developing these apps.

And I know what good software looks like. So I think it’s still software development. I think we just get, I think vibe coding. I want, I hope it dies, like the term. And we just get to a point where like, we’re just building software. Like we’re building things because we’re interested. We’re building things that we’re realizing that there’s not the limits held by, you know, our, my, my, limitations are on my knowledge on.

Brittany Ellich (20:45) Mm.

Sterling Chin (21:00) You know, I’m building an app for my sister, right? She’s a stay at home mom, doesn’t know technology, love her to death. She’s tech averse. couldn’t be more far apart than in the world. And I’m building her an app and she has an iPhone. Now I’m an Android user. Sorry, I’m the green bubble guy. Green bubble? Blue bubble? Yeah. Okay, cool. We’re the outcasts. But I’ve never…

Brittany Ellich (21:23) We have shared bubbles, yeah.

Sterling Chin (21:24) I like this. We have shared bubbles, but I’ve

never written a line of code in Swift. don’t know how I don’t know, understand Swift, but she wanted something that was native to her phone. So I did that. That’s like call that vibe coding. Maybe I just think it’s, I’m still writing software. I, I, even though I know I’m not looking at the code, I know what functionality, I know what good software, like what the architecture should look like.

I know the complexity. So let’s just change it and call it just writing, like building software.

Brittany Ellich (22:00) I love that. Yeah, I feel the same way where I feel like embarrassed. like, I’ve I’ve coded this, like, actually, most of the stuff that I write with like a heavy agent interaction with it is so much better now than something I write myself. Like they’ve gotten better than me as a software engineer. Like they’re they’re better. Just straight up. I find myself to the point now where I get like almost a little bit annoyed when I’m working with people that aren’t using agents or that are like, I don’t want to use it I’m like,

Like it’s so much faster to just ask it to do the thing than to do it yourself now. It’s yeah. So it’s very interesting.

Sterling Chin (22:36) It’s significantly faster. Like, okay, funny story. and, and I, so I was in, I was on Twitter yesterday. my friend Amanda Martins, we were having, I was talking about our new, like, so at ingest, I’m running a new event series, that’s called AI in production. It’s hosted at the ingest offices, but it’s not a, like, it’s, it’s really meant to be open to anyone who’s building AI in production.

Brittany Ellich (22:38) Mm-hmm.

Sterling Chin (23:01) And Amanda came back to me on Twitter and said, you should call it AI crimes in production because we’ve all shipped some type of crime that got me thinking. So in half an hour while I was, I was eating lunch yesterday at the office. I using cloud flare. may have, I didn’t, I did. I, it’s not that I may have. I absolutely did. bought AI dash crimes dash in dash production. And I have a, so it’s AI crimes in production.com.

You can anonymously, like you can anonymously confess your sins of what you’ve done in production. And it is, it’s now the best part is like, built a cloud code plugin with it. It’s like, like I’m going agent first, like the agent experience is all that, all that matters. So like, if you go to the website, it’s got a modern view of it, but then there’s a 99.

like 1999 version, so it looks like MySpace. And then there’s the agent view, which just tells the agent, here’s how you install like the plugin. Here’s the API, if you wanna use REST API. And now your agent can go in and confess for you. So the plugin, if you go slash confess in Cloud Code, it will, like there’s a whole skill that goes in. It’s like, if you made a mistake,

I’ve already had confessions coming in and I haven’t even announced, like I talked about it on Reddit and it was one, one, one person confessed about how they accidentally deleted their, like Cloud code deleted their whole stage folder, like their staging folder. And so when staging went down, like they had to go back and look at it and found that Cloud code had like deleted it and it was his commit that that caused it. So.

He’s like, all right, now, you know, Claude, Claude.MD now has, you know, you’re not allowed to touch, you know, you don’t touch the git ignore and you don’t touch state the staging. So I’m already having people confess these and it’s hilarious. But I did that in like half an hour. And it’s like there, there’s something like in the, in the mix of like, while I’m building something, I’m, I’m doing something else and I have a great idea. I joke about this, right? Pre AI.

We, how many, okay, Brittany, question for you. How many domains do you own or have you owned in the past? See, I love that face because I know exactly how many.

Brittany Ellich (25:36) I mean, I don’t feel like mine’s that bad. I think I’ve got like 14. So it’s not, could be worse. The number that I actually used, we don’t need to talk about it, but like, yeah.

Sterling Chin (25:43) I… I…

Right? The number

we used to, we’d get these domains. have these great ideas. We’d plant, we’d buy the domain and we’d plant our ideas on those domains. Pre-AI, we had no way of, like, okay, I’ll get to it someday. And those days don’t happen because at the end of your day, you’re still writing code. You’re like, I’m burnt out. I got to go touch grass. I got to go do something. Now, like, so.

I will be with I’m with you on this one. I will confess my own sins. I think I had something at the at my top. had like 30 plus domains that I that I owned and I had only two or three of them actually in use. And most of like two of them were sterling chin like sterlingchin.com. actually own my own my own name it and there was another variation of that one. Now I plant like I have this

Brittany Ellich (26:13) Mm-hmm.

Sterling Chin (26:40) I’m on my, well, Marvin, I have a whole folder in my, in my, in my Marvin that has like all these ideas. Now with the inception of like vibe coding or just building agents with, or, having an agent write code for us, I can build AI crimes in production in 30 minutes. And literally I did nothing. I just was talking. I’m, I’m over here with chopsticks eating noodles in the office and I’m telling Marvin to go build it for me and.

Brittany Ellich (27:09) Mm-hmm.

Sterling Chin (27:10) you know, he went and bought the domain like using CloudFlare’s MCP server. ⁓ it was, it’s weird. It’s super dangerous, super dangerous because my CloudFlare, like now I’m at like, now I think I’m gonna be, I’m more worried that I’m gonna have like hundreds of domains available because like not only do I buy them,

Brittany Ellich (27:15) Mm-hmm. I didn’t know that. That’s cool. It’s dangerous.

Sterling Chin (27:38) But I built something that’s just sitting out there, like ⁓ AI crimes in production. it’s a lot of fun. again, those domains, we, so pre-code, pre-AI, we used to just park our domains pre really the agentic era, which I think started with OpenClaw and Marvin for me, like at the end of last year, we were all parking ideas in some folder. Now there’s no excuse.

Brittany Ellich (27:43) Yeah.

Sterling Chin (28:05) In 30 minutes, you can take an idea from inception to deploying and it’s all live in production. And so I think it’s dangerous, hopefully. But I don’t say hopefully it’s dangerous. I know it’s dangerous. But I’m having so much fun. Honestly, Brittany, when was the last time we had this much fun writing code?

Brittany Ellich (28:22) Mm-hmm.

So true. yeah, it’s no longer all of the friction of it has sort of melted away any of the things you used to get stuck on is just like not there anymore. And yeah, I have never had as much fun, I think, working in software as I am.

Sterling Chin (28:41) I look at,

I looked at, if you, yeah, if you look at my GitHub, like, you know, my green, my green bar, I look at this year and I have committed, have, last time I looked at it, I had something like a thousand commits, like just this year alone. Now I looked at that compared to last year and I had something like five or like, you know, two or 300 commits last year. So if you count, but if I look at,

Brittany Ellich (28:47) Mm-hmm.

Sterling Chin (29:09) Like the last time I wrote production code, which was 2020, 2020, 2021. If I look at from 2021 and before, I am writing more code now than I was at the top of when I was at the top of my game. And I’m having more fun doing it. I’m, I’ve got more commits in GitHub. It’s, Brittany is just way too much fun, right?

Brittany Ellich (29:34) Yeah, I agree. It’s very cool. It’s kind of ruined my commit graph because now like the last like six months are super green and the rest of them aren’t. But other than that, if you don’t care about that, then that’s fine. But yeah, it’s like, did I work before? I swear I’ve been working in this industry for a while, but it doesn’t look like it now. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, right. That’s awesome.

Sterling Chin (29:43) Hahahaha

I promise I’m working. Yeah.

Brittany Ellich (29:56) This has been, my gosh, I’m excited to check out AI Crimes in production. And this has been super fun. But we need to switch to our fun segment in the interest of time. So the way we do this is we typically pick something that is related to whoever we’re interviewing, and it’s a different thing each time. We’re still calling it the fun segment, even though that is probably the worst name that we could have chosen because it’s very bland.

Sterling Chin (30:05) Yes.

Hahahaha

Brittany Ellich (30:21) But here’s where we are at for you, Sterling. So since you’ve built a lot of AI powered things, I’m gonna give you a series of everyday problems and you have 60 seconds or so to pitch an AI agent solution for it. ⁓ And yeah, and then we’ll see where it goes. Yeah. All right, so first one, the morning routine. So my mornings are chaos.

Sterling Chin (30:35) Ooh, ooh, I like this.

Brittany Ellich (30:45) kids, coffee, finding my keys, remembering what meetings I have, pitch me an AI agent that will fix my morning.

Sterling Chin (30:51) Does the agent have to do work for you? Like, it feed your kids? Because that’s a robot. Like, I don’t have that.

Brittany Ellich (30:59) If it can, then that sounds even better, but it does not have to feed your kids for you. like organizing it, remembering, and you have kids, you know how it is in the mornings, like remembering all the things you gotta do in the morning. Yeah, yeah, so.

Sterling Chin (31:06) Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I’m to, I’m going to pitch you the home hub that I, the family hub that I built for my family is I have a, actually have this down in my dining room. it knows there’s check, there’s checklists for each kid. They know what they need to do. and then when it’s done, like the AI is going to go back and look at it. like, all right, did you actually, you know, check like, is it, you’re good to go. it’s going to look at pull everyone’s calendar.

Brittany Ellich (31:16) Ooh, yes.

Sterling Chin (31:36) and it’s going to give you a really quick brief of what’s happening that day. It’s going to pull your, it’s going to pull the weather so the kids know what they need to wear. How, how hot is it going to be? So the AI agent is going to be saying, like you’ll have the weather app there, but it’ll say, make sure you have a hoodie. So now I don’t have to worry about that. Now the kids, well that will dynamically be added to the checklist for the kids. Get a hoodie, wear pants. I mean, I have a third grader, the kid.

It could be snowing outside and the kid’s still wearing shorts, but like at least I’ve told him to wear pants. Making coffee. It’s like you want to you want to brief. It’s like you got five minutes while you’re making coffee. Build like like talk to your agent and say what do I got going on for the day? What’s our current status? And at that point you can say hey, you know Johnny hasn’t hasn’t brushed his teeth. Susie has still hasn’t put her pants on.

And it’s going to be cold outside and, you know, Sterling is going is it has a meeting at nine. So he needs to leave, you know, five minutes ago and he’s and has he left? That’s there’s my pitch is like just bringing everyone’s everyone’s chaos into into that one into that one hub of for the family.

Brittany Ellich (32:53) That’s amazing. I actually have a screen like that and I’m gonna go build that now because I need that for myself. My kids would love that. They’re five, two, and two. And like they ask every single day, like what day is it? Is it a school day or not? Cause they just have no concept of like calendars. ⁓ So yeah.

Sterling Chin (32:58) Yes!

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

Hold on a second. Isn’t this the same app you made on the co on CoTV?

Brittany Ellich (33:17) you

never actually did anything with it after that. But that is why I originally bought the screen, because I was like, this is it, I’m going to use that and it’s going to be great. But that was also like, that was like a long time ago in AI years. So like, that was the beginning of last year. Yeah. I know.

Sterling Chin (33:33) I mean, a year ago, that was the beginning of last year. mean, in

this AI world, that’s five years ago. Like, it seems like I’ve known you for five years at this point. ⁓ Yeah, I’ll send you the repo ⁓ because I have it and it’s ridiculously silly. it, ⁓ the other thing is this hub changes during the day. So at night, it knows what time it is.

Brittany Ellich (33:42) Easy. Yeah. I know, right? Yeah. Yeah. Please.

Amazing.

⁓

Sterling Chin (34:02) So at night it switches to saying, hey, you need to get your backpack ready for tomorrow, put your snack in your stuff for tomorrow. And it gets the kids ready for the next day. And they still have those check marks, because you, you were the inspiration for my family hub that I built for my family. So.

Brittany Ellich (34:02) Mm-hmm.

That’s awesome. I

was like, ⁓ that sounds really familiar. That’s awesome. I love that you actually made that happen because yeah, I clearly have done nothing with it, but I’m like re I’m re motivated now because I do need this in my life, especially the night before. I didn’t think about that. Like getting ready for the next day. I never do that. And I absolutely should because it would make my life so much better in the mornings. Yeah.

Sterling Chin (34:25) I love this.

Yes.

the chaos in the mornings is wild. Getting kids like now if I could just get it now if I could just get the agent to pull my kids out of bed.

Brittany Ellich (34:54) my gosh, yes.

Sterling Chin (34:56) That’s, then I’m not the bad guy. It’s like, I’ll go get a robot to pull.

Like my oldest son is in middle school. It’s like, have him pull the blanket slowly off of him. So then he’s colder and colder and colder. And now it’s like, exactly. I, could, Brittany, I think we’ve just got a business idea. Like getting your, yeah. ⁓ genius.

Brittany Ellich (35:06) Get like a little retraction, yeah.

This could happen. I know, right?

Yeah, I love that. Amazing. Yeah, I’m sold. That was great. All right, I’ve got another one for you. Conference networking and keeping track of folks that you meet at conferences. Like what sort of AI agent could help there with like I met 47 people and I have all these LinkedIn connection requests and remembering what you’re supposed to follow up on. What are your thoughts? Go.

Sterling Chin (35:24) Okay.

this is a, this is a huge issue because I’ve, we spoke, both speak at conferences. I was at the MCP dev summit and I came back with like, I think 40 or 50 new connections on LinkedIn. Here’s what I, here’s what I want to do. ⁓ I’m going to grab this. I’m, Meta bought this, but there was the, ⁓ was it rewind?

Like they, they made the rewind pendant that’s supposed to record everything you do. ⁓ it got bought by Metta. I’m reverse engineering it on my own. Here’s an agent that I really want to do is I want to have a necklace that I’m wearing that records the conversation I have. Then I want that to be connected to the time log that when I go to LinkedIn, it can say, you have a new connection request by, so I met Brittany, Brittany and I were sitting there talking.

Well, now it goes back and says, here’s what we talked about during that conference or during that conversation. Now, Brittany and I did the phone thingy where we connected on LinkedIn. We know what time that one came in. We can sync that to the conversation and have an agent that pulls that context out and now adds that to a CRM of some kind, whether it’s Adio, Salesforce, or, mean, I rolled my own. have my own little CRM inside of Marvin that does all of this, but then

condenses that that’s the agent that I want I would build I want that more than anything is I just Because those conversations are what matter and I don’t want to take the time after talking to like I Don’t say that sounds rude. Like I don’t want to yeah I don’t want to take the time after I talk to you to sit there and go I Brittany and I talked about this. It’s like no we had a lot deeper conversation that I want to have so that’s that’s what I would do

Brittany Ellich (37:18) put them in your phone.

Mm-hmm.

I agree. Yeah, I always feel really bad that I’m like, I have to take notes on this thing. I promise I’m not just like checking my phone, but like if I don’t take these notes right now while we’re talking, it’s going to go out of my head and it’ll be gone forever. amazing. that was awesome. Yeah. I want that one too. Can you make that one for me, please? And let me know when it’s done and I’ll use that too. That’d be great. Thank you for solving my problems. great. so

Sterling Chin (37:36) Yeah!

Okay.

Perfect.

Brittany Ellich (37:52) Where can folks find you online if they want to find you? Where are you hanging out?

Sterling Chin (37:58) I’m so I primarily hang out on LinkedIn. Um, so you can find me Sterling chin, um, on LinkedIn. I’m on, I’m trying to get a little bit better about being on Twitter. Um, but my Twitter handle is so old. It’s at silver jaw 82. Yes. I recognize like silver jaw, sterling sterling, silver chin, jaw, then yeah, silver jaw. And then

Brittany Ellich (38:22) ⁓ I would not have made that connection.

Sterling Chin (38:26) 82 is when I was born. I mean, this is old, but that’s, that’s my Twitter handle. Um, you can always go to sterlingchin.com. Um, and everything is there. I’m on GitHub, uh, Sterling chin. You can find Marvin there. Marvin. If you search, um, Marvin dash template is where you can find Marvin, um, on my GitHub repo. Um, and yeah, he’s, he was, I think we hit 960. I want to get over a thousand like.

That would be my biggest achievement in my like, I feel like if I get to a thousand, I’m part of a cooler kids club or maybe I just yeah, like it’s like it’s a claim to fame. So yeah, those are those are the three places I am on blue sky. Same thing. I think I’m at Sterling Chinn at on blue sky, but I don’t really post there as much.

Brittany Ellich (39:02) You made it. Yeah.

It’s better.

Sterling Chin (39:18) I, well, I like it, but the problem is like the whole dev community is still on Twitter. And I go in, that’s the hard part is like, I, I’m trying to disconnect from it, but yet I’m lucky because at least my Twitter is not full of the cesspool that has been Twitter for so long. It’s like, only follow certain people. I’ve really highly curated it, but again, I like blue sky. I really want blue sky to win.

Brittany Ellich (39:23) Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Sterling Chin (39:44) And then, yeah, I do have a YouTube channel. I don’t do much with it. ⁓ I should probably do more, but it’s there.

Brittany Ellich (39:51) It’s a lot of things that you’ve already got going on, so I get it.

Sterling Chin (39:53) Yeah.

But yeah, sterlingchin.com guaranteed. You’re going to see where I’m speaking. If I’m at a conference, you’ll see all my speaker notes. You’ll get all of my LinkedIn. I’m also on Substack. That’s the other place. I forgot to mention that. Substack. Same thing. Sterling Chin on Substack. You’ll find me. It’s nice being the only Sterling Chin in the world that I’m aware of.

Brittany Ellich (40:05) okay.

Yeah.

⁓ that’s nice. Excellent. Yes. Well, make sure all of those links are in the show notes. And thank you so much for joining us. And listeners, thank you for tuning in to Overcommitted. If you like what you hear, please do follow, subscribe, or do whatever it is you’re supposed to do on the podcast app of your choice. Check us out on Blue Sky and, and Sterling so that he can feel like the developer community is there for him there. And share with your friends. Until next week. Goodbye.

Sterling Chin (40:42) See ya.