How I AI

Ezra Mechaber is a growth product manager at Figma whose goal is to be “lazy in the right places.” When he joined Figma, he found almost no one outside engineering using AI to get real work done, so he and a couple of fellow PMs turned his personal Claude Code setup into PM OS, a shared repo of 31 skills that every PM at Figma now uses. In this episode, Ezra walks me through his favorite skills, how he bug bashes with Codex, AutoXP—an automated growth PM that found a huge win on its very first experiment—and a real-time writing assistant he built with Jev.

What you’ll learn:
Why PM OS is a repo, not a product
The skill Ezra runs six times a day to tame Slack
How one repo keeps 60 to 70 PMs in sync
Why his bug-bash agent catches things he never would
How AutoXP runs experiments with one human checkpoint
Why Jev took over every meeting he was in for two weeks
What to do when you want to yell at your AI
—
Brought to you by:
Optimizely—Your AI agent orchestration platform for marketing and digital teams
Jira Product Discovery—Prioritize with insights, build with confidence
—
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Episode preview
(00:51) Introduction to Ezra Mechaber
(02:04) The origin story of Figma’s PM OS
(06:30) PM OS demo: the “chief of staff” setup
(10:28) How the repo works: skills, hooks, and private sub-repos
(12:00) How the skills got built, roasted, and whittled down
(14:15) Build artifact, FigJam MCP, and coaching skills
(17:33) Transitioning from the terminal to a local web front end
(19:30) Bug bashing with Codex
(22:08) AutoXP: an automated growth PM
(26:26) Claire’s Experiment Engine backstory
(26:58) Building a real-time writing assistant with Jev
(33:15) Lightning round and final thoughts
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Tools referenced:
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/
• FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/
• Figma MCP server: https://developers.figma.com/docs/figma-mcp-server/
• Claude Code: https://www.claude.com/product/claude-code
• Codex: https://openai.com/codex/
• Cursor Automations: https://cursor.com/docs/cloud-agent/automations
• Jev: https://typesafe.ai/
• Marker: https://marker.page/
• Instinct: https://instinct.com/
• Dots: https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/
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Other reference:
• Jev for beginners: how to use it and what to build: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/jev-for-beginners-how-to-use-it-and
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Where to find Ezra Mechaber:
X: https://x.com/ezramechaber
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ezra-mechaber
Website: https://ezramechaber.com/
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Where to find Claire Vo:
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
X: https://x.com/clairevo
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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.

I have personal-agent fatigue, so I ran the first How I AI personal-agent benchmark: Grok Bot, Dot, Muse, and Claude Duet across nine real tasks, from a Slack reply and a Sentry bug to a Figma thumbnail, inbox triage, a family newspaper, physics homework for a fourth grader, shoe shopping, and a ChatPRD launch video. I used computer use to operate them: Claude ran Dot, Codex ran the rest and scored the results live. Here’s the scoreboard—and which agent I’d actually trust for work vs. life.
—
Brought to you by:
WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more
Firecrawl—Give your AI agents web data and beyond
—
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Introduction
(02:13) The personal-agent benchmark setup
(05:00) The nine tasks and the prompts I used
(07:20) Scoreboard overview
(10:06) Task 1: Draft a Slack reply as me
(11:39) Task 2: Cut a short-form video from raw Dropbox footage
(14:56) Task 3: Fix a bug from Sentry
(17:30) Task 4: Build a How I AI thumbnail in Figma
(19:25) Task 5: Triage my inbox for to-dos
(21:06) Task 6: Build a family newspaper
(23:30) Task 7: Explain a physics homework question to a fourth grader
(24:54) Task 8: Shop for shoes
(26:46) Task 9: Make a ChatPRD Product Intelligence launch video
(30:01) Final scores
(32:38) My takeaways
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Tools referenced:
• Grok Bot: https://x.ai/bot
• Dot: https://chatgpt.com/features/dots/
• Meta Muse: https://ai.meta.com/muse/
• Claude Duet: https://claude.com/product/claude-duet
• Codex: https://openai.com/codex
• ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io/
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/
• Sentry: https://sentry.io/
• Linear: https://linear.app/
• Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/
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Where to find Claire Vo:
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
X: https://x.com/clairevo
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.

Blair Metcalf is the principal UX engineer at Reddit and the builder of Reddit Proto, the company’s in-house vibe-coding harness. With a design system MCP that maps Reddit’s product language to production code, Proto has reached 100% adoption across Reddit’s UX and product org, and more than 700 prototypes are live on it.

What you’ll learn:
Why Reddit built its own prototyping harness
How designers share prototypes with leadership safely
Why real Reddit data beats mock data
How one annotation becomes a code edit in Cursor
What a “feature capsule” is
Why Blair built a “Rosetta stone”
Blair’s surprising fix when AI goes sideways
Who turned out to be Reddit’s best prototypers
—
This entire episode is brought to you by:
Firecrawl—Give your AI agents web data and beyond
—
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Introduction to Blair
(02:31) Reddit Proto demo
(09:15) Annotations to Cursor: the targeted edit workflow
(11:19) Internal deployment and adoption
(14:14) How leadership reviews and gives feedback
(15:52) Engineering handoff and the feature capsule
(17:50) How the custom MCP was built
(21:41) Quick recap
(24:55) Lightning round and final thoughts
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Tools referenced:
• Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/
• Figma: https://www.figma.com/
• Figma MCP (Figma’s Model Context Protocol integration): https://www.figma.com/mcp-catalog/
• Code Connect (Figma’s code mapping tool): https://www.figma.com/developers/code-connect
• Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/
• ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/
• Vercel (referenced as inspiration for internal deploy infra): https://vercel.com/
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Other references:
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/
• Kubernetes: https://kubernetes.io/
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Where to find Blair Metcalf:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jblairmetcalf
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Where to find Claire Vo:
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
X: https://x.com/clairevo
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.

Anthropic's new personal agent, Claude Duet, lives on your phone, inherits all your Claude plugins and connectors, and is pitched at small business owners and busy professionals. It's the most polished agent launch I've seen: thoughtful onboarding, task lists, first-class artifacts, and Slack-style channels. But polish isn't enough when you're competing with every other personal agent for attention. I put it to work on my inbox and Slack, my sales pipeline, a Google Docs sales deck, a launch video, and finding Warriors tickets for my kids, and I'll walk you through what it nails, where it stalls, and what Anthropic needs to fix before it can become anyone's number one agent.

What you’ll learn:
What Claude Duet is and who Anthropic built it for
The design details that make it far more polished than other personal agent launches
How task lists, artifacts, and channels work as agent primitives
Why a “proactive” agent that never nudges you is a growth problem
How model latency kills your willingness to work with an agent synchronously
Where it fell short on real tasks, from inbox triage to sales decks to launch videos
Why missing desktop and multiplayer support keeps it out of my working stack
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Personal agent fatigue: does Claude Duet make the cut?
(00:40) What Claude Duet is and who it’s for
(01:39) Why the design polish stands out
(03:06) Task lists, artifacts, and channels
(04:53) The icon
(05:27) What I didn’t like: not proactive enough
(07:02) Testing it on email, Slack, and Warriors tickets
(07:41) Why latency matters so much in a personal agent
(10:20) The missing desktop app
(12:12) Sales pipeline and a Google Docs deck
(13:10) Launch videos and the local skills gap
(14:00) Single-player vs. multiplayer agents
(15:05) Final verdict
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Tools referenced:
• Claude Duet (Anthropic): https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-duet
• Claude Duet Waitlist: https://claude.com/product/claude-duet
• Claude Cowork: https://claude.com/product/cowork
• Meta Muse: https://muse.ai/
• Codex (OpenAI): https://openai.com/codex
• Grok Bot: https://x.ai/bot
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Where to find Claire Vo:
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
X: https://x.com/clairevo
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.

Brooke Lacey has been making videos since before Facebook had video, and she built a TikTok audience of more than 290,000 by learning to cut short-form videos herself. With over 25 years in tech, she now builds her own apps, including Zosha, a free mobile app for learning AI. In this episode, Brooke walks me through the Claude Code, FFmpeg, and Whisper workflow that edits her TikToks in about 15 seconds, how she mines her comments for new scripts, and how she runs a weekly short-form operation with no editor.

What you’ll learn:
How Claude Code edits a raw phone video on her computer in about 15 seconds
How she taught Claude her jump-cut cadence
Why her TikTok comments became her content brief
How she keeps growing her audience while posting just once a week—and what’s next
What over 25 years in tech taught her about this AI moment
—
Brought to you by:
Firecrawl—Give your AI agents web data and beyond
Auros—The human network behind AI
—
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Intro and guest welcome
(02:30) Brooke’s background in video
(06:56) Her first session cutting videos with Claude Code
(08:51) Live demo: Claude edits a video in real time
(11:05) Walking through the edit chain
(15:58) How she taught Claude her cadence, her hooks, and what funny sounds like
(25:36) Quick recap
(26:20) Posting frequency, live streaming plans, and TikTok ads
(28:00) Lightning round: Gen X, wisened experience, and YOLO energy
(32:43) When Claude disappoints: the lane OS, status files, and how she prompts it back
(34:50) Where to find Brooke and the Zosha app
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Tools referenced:
• Claude Code: https://claude.ai/code
• FFmpeg: https://ffmpeg.org
• Whisper (OpenAI): https://openai.com/research/whisper
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Other reference:
• How I AI episode with John Blackman (91-year-old vibe coder): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-a-91-year-old-vibe-coded-a-complex?utm_source=publication-search
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Where to find Brooke:
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brookejlacey
X: https://x.com/brookejlacey
Zosha app: http://zosha.app/
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Where to find Claire Vo:
ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/
Website: https://clairevo.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/
X: https://x.com/clairevo
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.