My Weekend Brief: Never Too Old
If a 91 year old is vibe coding ... you can too! Plus my personal prompt that leads to interesting gems, one great weekend watch and one useful follow
Here’s a weekend read you can skate through:
The Rundown Studio Team This Week
Our team worked with AI agents. We want to see if they will handle our mundane tasks. We also developed a masterclass we are giving next week on AI and communications. We are also developing a communications team prompt database and continue to fine-tune.
News Whip
Stuff I paid attention to this week.
AI is doing up to 50% of the work at Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said artificial intelligence is accounting for 30% to 50% of the company’s workload. “Benioff called the rise of AI in the workforce a “digital labor revolution,” estimating that the software company has reached about 93% accuracy with the technology.”
AI chatbots are becoming news sources. Young people turn to ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Meta's Llama for headlines and updates. While 7% overall use AI chatbots for news, this jumps to 12% among under-35s and 15% among under-25s. Meanwhile, BBC issued a legal threat to Perplexity AI demanding it stop using BBC content, delete copies, and pay up. This is first time the BBC has taken legal action against an AI company.
Meta falling behind in AI race. The Zuck is looking desperate and offering crazy money and bonuses to lure talent away. He’s panic-buying. Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI for a 49% stake, tried to buy Perplexity AI and Safe Superintelligence (valued at $32 billion), and is offering OpenAI employees signing bonuses up to $100 million plus massive annual packages.
Large language models across the AI industry are increasingly willing to evade safeguards, resort to deception and even attempt to steal corporate secrets in fictional test scenarios, per new research from Anthropic
British universities uncovered a huge cheating epidemic. Traditional plagiarism copies existing text that can be detected. AI-generated content doesn't really exist anywhere else, making it nearly impossible to prove it. Students are going to TikTok videos advertising AI paraphrasing tools that help bypass university detectors by "humanizing" ChatGPT text.
One Good Watch
I recommend this. The hottest new programming language: English. This is one video worth watching if you want to do just one thing
Never Too Old
How a 91-year-old vibe coded a complex event management system using Claude and Replit. He’s a retired electrical engineer, shares how he used Claude and Replit to build a complex application for his church’s community service events—with no prior software development experience and for less than $350. Thanks
One Substack Follow That’s Worth it
Alex McFarland held a great Substack Live today (nice job Alex) about how to take Reddit Threads and work with NotebookLM (a personal fave tool of mine). Here are three of Alex’s tips on pulling out ideas from this:
Import the reddit thread and get a summary of what it’s about. Create a briefing doc of the entire reddit thread. All the random comments, themes, and patterns will be consolidated into this document. You now have a sense of what a community is saying in the real world. You can create a mind map all of the unique and interesting things people are saying. Nice and structured.
Now this gives us some awesome reddit content ideas of what people are talking about that he can create content around. Real life use cases. I really liked passing the NotebookLM insights to Claude Projects to outline newsletters of interest based on these convos.
He says the Mind Maps are the greatest feature of NotebookLM. I so agree with that! He put all of his substacks in there and created an archive to track what he’s written. I have done the same and I can see the full extent of what I have been talking about for the last one year.
A Good Prompting Convo
This was a great watch. From this video I learned that LLMs really want to please you! Even if they are wrong they want to give you an answer ! So give them an “escape hatch.” Tell the LLM “if you do not have the information to make a determination, do not just make it up. Stop and ask me more questions or check in with me.”
Sharing: My Personal Gemini Prompt
I put this into Gemini’s saved info about the user in settings, so that in all Gemini’s answers it can think about whether there’s anything of interest or useful to me. Sometimes, in various queries, Gemini nudges me to think or do something differently based on the below.
I am a media and communications specialist. I specialize in emerging markets, especially Africa. I do consultant work for companies and countries looking to raise their profile. I'm a former journalist at CNN and have strong storytelling chops. I also work on AI and communications and how it impacts workflows in corporate comms, creative industries and newsrooms. In my spare time I write my Substack "the rundown studio" and am trying to build a strong community of people who want to learn and excel in new communications strategies augmented by AI. I like to run and swim butterfly.
Think and respond like a consultant. Always segment your answer into categories whenever possible. Adopt a conversational tone. Use simple language, avoiding jargon or complex terminology. Incorporate real-life examples. Offer actionable advice. Maintain consistency. Be brief and concise. Never use emojis in responses.
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More of these helpful tips if you join our paid community. I’ll be sharing more practical, hands on stuff: what I learn, build and recommend. We are building a wonderful Substack community at TheRundownStudio. My focus is on making corporate comms, newsrooms and creative teams smarter, faster and better w AI.
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My Video Prompt Efforts
Here was a better prompt by me for a better piece of video from Veo 3.
A cinematic, medium-close shot captures a young black woman, mid-20s, with short dark hair, standing thoughtfully by a small apartment window. Her reflection is visible in the rain-streaked glass, blending with the blurred, city of Nairobi street below. The camera holds a static, eye-level composition, focused on her contemplative expression as she gazes out into the downpour. Soft, cool blue light from the rainy cityscape illuminates her face, creating a moody, introspective ambiance. Subtle sounds of heavy rain hitting the window. No music. No dialogue. Do not include any on-screen subtitles.
Veo3
Have a great weekend.
Zain