Interview #13: James Hamilton

Noah Weisblat: Cool. All right, and three, two. All right. I'm here with James Hamilton. James, thank you for joining me today. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself?

James Hamilton: Of course. Yeah. James Hamilton from Ohio, same area as Noah. Noah and I actually played baseball together back in the day, so those connections are going back. But I kind of, you know, went to Ohio State, was a software engineer, and now working on my own company.

Noah: Very cool. Tell me about your company.

James: Yeah, so it's called Dubble. Basically what we do is we help creators and brands grow through short-form clipping campaigns. And what that means is essentially a creator or a brand will give us their long-form content, whether that be a live stream, a podcast, any sort of like videos they've made generally, and then we'll connect them with people who will make short clips of that content. And then like flood TikTok, Instagram, YouTube with those videos. So, yeah, that's basically the idea.

Noah: Cool. When did you get started with it? And how's it going so far?

James: It's been like a month since we've launched and it's been going pretty well. We have like a consistent client who basically brings in other clients for us, which is nice. Kind of like an agency. And so, trying to get on track with more of those types of clients as well at the moment.

Noah: Cool. So, the big topic today is AI. So, can you talk to me about how you are using AI with Dubble? I know there's—I've kind of seen different platforms trying to essentially automate clipping, and I think that's pretty tough to do right now, just from my understanding, but you probably might have a better idea on that. But just talking about if you're using AI within Dubble, how you're using it, and where you kind of see AI being implemented into the space that you're in over the next couple of months, couple of years.

James: Yeah, I think AI clipping is—I think it'll happen eventually, but our thesis is kind of that you need some sort of human input and interaction in order to like get the actual most creative clips possible. So, you can run—there are a bunch of softwares like Opus Clip, Descript, those types of things—you can run like a whole podcast through it and it'll give you a bunch of clips. But like, in order to have like the best hooks, the best payoffs, that sort of thing, you really need some sort of human in the loop to figure that out, and maybe eventually get to the point where you don't, but at least at the moment you certainly do. And so like what we do is we connect you with like real human clippers. And a lot of them might use some AI tools for assistance, but they give you that human creativity aspect as well. So, in the business itself, AI is mostly just used like for coding, which is what we do, and that helps us a ton. Lets us like push features out. We're building a Discord bot right now, and that's, you know, like a couple years ago that would have taken me probably maybe a month or two. Right now, we're probably like two days before it's done. So, yeah, it just helps accelerate things and lets you test things so much quicker.

Noah: What type of coding assists are you using? Are you using Cursor, Cloud Code, something different?

James: I use Cloud Code and Cursor. I pay for both, and it's a hefty bill, but I think it's worth it, because like, so Cloud Code has like a $20 a month plan, which gets you a good amount of credits and usage, but sometimes you run out, and like the next plan is like an enterprise plan, which I don't want to pay. So, if I run out, I'll just like go to Cursor as my backup.

Noah: Nice. I had this a couple months ago when I was building something outside. I had two Cloud Code accounts on two different computers. So, if I ran out on one, I would try and switch to the other and go back and forth. That's cool. So, talking about kind of the major elements you're using outside of specific business assistance tools, are you using ChatGPT, Claude, in general, Gemini, which ones are those you're using?

James: Yeah, Claude, obviously for Cloud Code, and then, yeah, ChatGPT here and there. I'll do like high-level like architecture-type stuff in ChatGPT. So, it's kind of just like if I need general input on like maybe how things are typically done in systems that I'm building, that sort of thing is when I rely on ChatGPT. I don't really use the Claude chat front end at all. I don't know if you do, but I don't really.

Noah: Oh yeah, a little bit. I think, yeah, a decent amount. I'm running into a couple things with memory. I'm trying to make sure that obviously context is big between some of these platforms, so just kind of making sure that they remember what I'm telling them, especially as the conversations get longer. I don't know if you've seen that at all.

James: Well, I don't know about you, but on ChatGPT, I get so annoyed when it pulls up—like, for instance, it's not related to coding—I was asking it something about like, I was debating between these two medicines, like over-the-counter medicine that you get, and then it's like, "Well, since you are a software engineer and you like work like this, you should probably aim towards this one." Like, that's not what I was—I didn't want that input!

Noah: Definitely, that’s annoying.

James: But yeah, for coding purposes, like definitely like if you're on a really long context window, it's obviously super tough to like remember maybe what you did at the beginning or the initial goal and that sort of thing. And so I know like with Cloud Code there's like agents and all this sort of stuff, which I haven't really had too much time to dive into too much and like learn about how that works for improving context windows, but yeah, I will be soon because my buddy's been pounding me about it.

Noah: Nice. I'll talk a couple of different industry-wide things. Obviously, there's so much going on in the AI space. Personally, I find robotics interesting. As a software engineer, I'm sure you have some take on robotics or humanoid robots, whether or not you've kind of explored that. Talk to me about kind of how you feel about robotics and maybe those humanoid robots that are starting to come out a little bit, and where you see that space going.

James: Yeah, it's so cool. I wish I had like—I would love to just like walk a factory floor and just like see what's going on in that space so much. I mean, yeah, I think that's kind of where the robots are going to be the biggest, is going to be in these like manufacturing facilities. Like, we're seeing it already. Um, like Figure is a really cool one. Obviously, like Optimus with Tesla is a sick one as well. I don't have too much knowledge there though. I just know it's cool. I know it's going to be a big thing, and so I'm excited to see the future.

Noah: Yeah, absolutely. What else kind of comes to mind when you think about the future of the AI space, maybe five years down the road? What kind of what excites you?

James: I mean, I think a lot about content creation and how that changes, just since that's like my business right now. I think probably the best content creator—I mean, it's kind of similar to coding, right? Like now we can iterate so much faster because of AI, and it just helps us build so much quicker. Like, speed to creating a video or creating a piece of content is greater than—like, I think you'll see a lot of people speedrunning some of the creative process and be able to figure out their like, you know, content market fit almost quicker than quicker than normal. So, that's what I'm excited about. Could be kind of scary in some ways. It's a lot of like bots and AI avatars and whatever, but I think it could also help you boost your creativity as well. So, there's two futures. I think one is probably better than the other. We'll see which one wins out.

Noah: Yeah, I tend to agree there. All right, what are some more questions? So, being in the clipping space, obviously you're seeing a ton of stuff with—I mean, specifically, your company isn't really focusing on AI-generated content for my understanding. You're more focused on cutting more longer-form content, correct if I'm wrong there. And then also, what are your thoughts just on the AI-generated content boom? I feel like there's a lot of pushback on that on social media. There's obviously the "with, okay, artists are doing these things, should not be taken by AI." There's so many different angles there, but just in general, how do you feel about AI-generated content?

James: Yeah, so we're definitely mostly focused on human-edited clips right now, and like we said, like people use AI tools to make those clips, that's fine, and we're open to it in the future. Kind of just gonna ride the wave, see what happens. But AI-generated content in general, I mean, I don't know. Some of it like, some of that stuff is funny. Like there's some good stuff in there. So like I'm not against it as long as it like—as long as someone enjoys it, I don't necessarily see an issue with it. Obviously, maybe like if you're, I don't know, taking away or stealing someone else's art or something like that, there's some issues. But at the end of the day, like if people are enjoying it, then that's good. And if people aren't, which it seems like a lot of people online are not enjoying it, then like we'll slow down on it. But I think the market will work how the market will work. So, if people like it, it'll stay around. If you don't like it, it'll go.

Noah: Yeah, it's a good point. Absolutely. All right. Yeah, I think that's pretty much all I got for you. Anything else that we didn't talk about that you want to bring up?

James: Nah, man, this is great. Appreciate you having me on.

Noah: Oh, hey James, thank you for your time.

James: Yes, sir.