Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

AF Aaron Francis Aaron Francis Software developer and database educator, co-founder of Try Hard Studios with Steve Tenuto, making video courses on SQLite, Postgres and MySQL for developers.

“What I want is I don't want you to build AI into your app, I want you to make AI usable from outside your app. I want you to give me the best CLI, API, MCP in the world, and give me access to my data, and I'll take care of the rest. That's what I want as a very stupid developer.”

Mostly Technical · Laravel Ecosystem · September 2026

“What I want is I don't want you to build AI into your app, I want you to make AI usable from outside your app. I want you to give me the best CLI, API, MCP in the world, and give me access to my data, and I'll take care of the rest. That's what I want as a very stupid developer.” — Aaron Francis, Mostly Technical

Francis, while admitting he doesn't represent the market, on how B2B software should handle AI. Ian Landsman pushed back that most people work inside one app all day and won't run their own AI setup outside it, so products will need both an MCP and built-in AI.

Transcript

Mostly Technical Around 58:53 into the episode
Aaron Francis

third-party agent, HubSpot, increase, own agents, a long time CRM, extra agent, API, another niche product. Yeah, so everyone is uh raising prices. Yes, yeah,

Ian Landsman

…is the time to raise the prices, and then you know, who knows? Maybe you won't be able to sustain that raised price. Maybe in three years, right? The AI is everywhere, and there's tons of downward price pressure. Then you'll cut prices, and that's fine. But real now, it's the time to raise prices.

Aaron Francis

You know what I want as a very stupid developer who's not representative of the market at all. What I want is I don't want you to build AI into your app, I want you to make AI usable from outside your app. I want you to give me the best CLI, API, MCP in the world, and give me access to my data, and I'll take care of the rest. That's what I want as a very stupid developer. That's exactly what I think this is the

Ian Landsman

standard developer take, right? This is what you see. Everybody, they're like all day on Twitter. It's like, oh, I'll just use the MCP and whatever, and that's fine, and you will. But that's not how most people are. Most people are in this app all day, they don't have their own local thing, or if…

Aaron Francis

Bob. He should get a dream a little bigger. He's gnawing, but he's not.

Ian Landsman

So you got, so I think all these B2B apps are going to have both, right? You're going to have your MCP and you're going to have whatever comes next and all this stuff, but you're also going to have your internal AI stuff because that's where honestly most of the people using it are using it. And so…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from Mostly Technical