Behind the Craft

Ethan is the product lead for ChatGPT Finances at OpenAI. He previously co-founded Digit, which helped more than 10 million people save over $9 billion. In our interview, he shared six practical ways to use ChatGPT to find wasted spending, save money on taxes, maximize credit card rewards, and model major financial decisions. I’m confident at least one of these use cases will save you money today.

Ethan and I talked about:
(00:00) ChatGPT Finances can save you money right now
(03:37) Use case 1: Cancel recurring subscriptions
(09:37) How ChatGPT protects your financial data
(18:03) Use case 2: Find tax savings proactively
(24:58) Use case 3: Cut ETF and mutual fund fees
(26:20) Use case 4: Maximize credit card rewards
(28:20) Use case 5: Model income and taking time off
(31:05) Use case 6: Decide whether to rent or buy
(34:00) How to set up recurring finance checks
(36:58) Shipping 47 product updates in one week

Thanks to our sponsors:

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Riverside: All-in-one AI studio for podcasts and video https://creators.riverside.com/PeterYang

Linear: The AI agent platform for modern teams https://linear.app/behind-the-craft

📌 Get the takeaways: https://creatoreconomy.so/p/how-to-save-money-now-with-chatgpt-finances-ethan-bloch

Where to find Ethan:

X: https://x.com/ebloch
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebloch/
Website: https://ethanbloch.com/

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Pedro is widely respected as one of the most AI-pilled CEOs out there. His hot take is that “agents” is a terrible name. Instead, he showed me what you should build: AI employees that have a defined job, skills, manager, and budget. Pedro also did a live demo of how he still uses OpenClaw to stay on top of his $5B business.

Pedro and I talked about:

(00:00) Build AI employees, not AI agents
(05:23) Why Pedro spends half his time reviewing work
(12:32) Live demo: Jim, Brex’s AI recruiting employee
(21:24) Why Brex makes engineers build with AI in interviews
(22:33) CrabTrap: How to stop AI employees from leaking data
(27:30) The tokenmaxxing bill is coming. Here’s how to control it
(40:45) Live demo: Pedro’s OpenClaw system runs his life

Thanks to our sponsors:

Riverside: All-in-one AI studio for podcasts and video https://creators.riverside.com/PeterYang

Linear: The AI agent platform for modern teams https://linear.app/behind-the-craft

📌 Get the takeaways: https://creatoreconomy.so/p/stop-building-ai-agents-build-ai-employees-insead-pedro-franceschi-brex

Where to find Pedro:

X: https://x.com/pedroh96

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pfranceschi/

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📌 Copy the AI system I use to run a one-person $1M+ business: https://www.behindthecraft.com
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Sue is the co-founder and CEO of Brilliant, an interactive learning platform with 10M+ learners. I asked her how AI can help kids learn without doing their thinking for them, and she played back a real session with Koji, Brilliant’s AI tutor. If you’re building AI products or raising kids, watch how it helps a student work through a mistake without handing over the answer.

We talked about:
(00:00) Why AI should make kids think harder
(01:34) Why test scores are down while grades are up
(09:41) Koji: An AI tutor that won’t give you the answer
(18:05) Why humans design lessons and AI builds them
(22:25) Primitives: The building blocks behind Brilliant’s AI
(29:30) Testing AI lessons with simulated students
(32:10) Measuring learning, not lesson completion
(34:39) Sue’s rule for competing with the big AI labs
(39:10) How to raise kids who enjoy doing hard things

Thanks to our sponsors:
Riverside: All-in-one AI studio for podcasts and video https://creators.riverside.com/PeterYang
Linear: The AI agent platform for modern teams https://linear.app/behind-the-craft
Wispr Flow: 4x faster than typing with your voice https://ref.wisprflow.ai/peteryang

Where to find Sue:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sue-khim-70b86014/
Brilliant: https://brilliant.org

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📌 Copy the AI system I use to run a one-person $1M+ business: https://www.behindthecraft.com
🤝 Subscribe to my practical AI newsletter read by 150K+ professionals: https://creatoreconomy.so

As head of product engineering at Replit, Amol has a firsthand look at which vibe-coded apps become real businesses. He showed me three apps built by non-coders that reached six figures, then walked through his 4-step process to take a prototype to production — publishing, security, monetization, and distribution.

Amol and I talked about:
(00:00) He built an app in 3 days that made $100K+ in month one
(02:08) Three vibe-coded apps that became real businesses
(08:04) What six-figure vibe-coded apps have in common
(12:31) Live demo: Turn an AI interview coach into a real business
(13:59) Steps 1 and 2: Publish the app and make it secure
(17:50) Steps 3 and 4: Add payments and optimize SEO
(21:35) How to replace expensive SaaS with internal tools
(28:22) What software survives when code costs almost nothing
(31:02) Why value is moving from models to apps

Thanks to our sponsors:

Riverside: All-in-one AI studio for podcasts and video https://creators.riverside.com/PeterYang
Linear: The AI agent platform for modern teams https://linear.app/behind-the-craft
Wispr Flow: 4x faster than typing with your voice https://ref.wisprflow.ai/peteryang

📌 Get the takeaways: https://creatoreconomy.so/p/how-non-coders-are-vibe-coding-100k-businesses-with-ai-amol-jain-replit

Where to find Amol:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jainamol
Website: https://replit.com

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📌 Copy the AI system I use to run a one-person $1M+ business: https://www.behindthecraft.com
🤝 Subscribe to my practical AI newsletter read by 150K+ professionals: https://creatoreconomy.so

Shreya and Hamel teach the industry standard course for AI evaluations taken by 4,500+ students from OpenAI, Google, and more. In our interview, I asked them to give live feedback on the AI evals that I built for my skills and demo how anyone can run evals with ChatGPT/Claude and their free evals skill. Don’t miss this up to date primer on evals from the real experts. 🙂

P.S., I asked Shreya and Hamel to give my audience 25% off the next cohort of their AI evals course. It has 4.7 stars with 900 reviews which is almost unheard of on Maven. Sign up via the link here: https://maven.com/parlance-labs/evals?utm_campaign=peteryang&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=maven&promoCode=PETERYANG

We talked about:
(00:00) Why AI evals are completely different now with the latest models
(02:30) Demo: Live audit of the evals that I built for my AI skills
(05:14) Top down vs. bottom up evals and why AI sucks at the latter
(08:16) Spinning up AI agents to grade each eval criteria
(14:32) Demo: Using Shreyas AI skill to run evals in Claude
(23:46) How to review output labels to identify failures
(34:37) How to turn failures into reusable evals
(43:19) Where human judgement is still needed

Resources mentioned:
Free eval skills from Shreya: https://github.com/ai-evals-course/evals-skills
Do automated evals work?: https://parlance-labs.com/blog/posts/auto-evals/

Thanks to our sponsors:
Wispr Flow — 4x faster than typing with your voice — https://ref.wisprflow.ai/peteryang

📌 Get the takeaways: https://creatoreconomy.so/p/how-to-build-better-ai-evals-with-claude-code-shreya-hamel

Where to find Shreya and Hamel:
Shreya: https://www.sh-reya.com/
Hamel: https://hamel.dev/

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