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

Start free trial →
TK Tyler King Co-founder and CEO of Less Annoying CRM, a bootstrapped CRM for small businesses he started with his brother Bracken in 2009.

“I think it should be like 90% of this is like we wrote deterministic old school code and we only call the LLM for very specific parts of this where we have to interpret language and make decisions. That's the only thing the LLM is doing.”

Startup to Last · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · November 2026

“I think it should be like 90% of this is like we wrote deterministic old school code and we only call the LLM for very specific parts of this where we have to interpret language and make decisions. That's the only thing the LLM is doing.” — Tyler King, Startup to Last

Context

Tyler King on his new AI product bet. Agents burn tokens at every step, so for business software he wants mostly ordinary code, with the model called only where language has to be interpreted.

Transcript

Startup to Last Around 51:04 into the episode
Tyler King

like, even if you schedule a task, my impression of what's happening is it is taking the text prompt that whatever you give and giving it to the LLM fresh every single time. That's you might get a different result every single time.

Rick Lindquist

…like the basic. Yeah. What you can't, what they also have is the concept of artifacts, which are kind of coded like bodies of work that are static from a container perspective, but dynamic within that container. And then you can have the scheduled task do stuff within that container. Yeah, I've

Tyler King

done a bit of that. Again, I'm being vague because like this is still blurry and we're still making giving it shape. I think there's a lot more to do there where instead of 10% of stuff is predefined in an artifact and 90% is LLMs burning tokens on the fly. I think like most SAS, this isn't true for all LLM use, but for like SaaS use cases, I think it should be like 90% of this is like we wrote deterministic old school code and we only call the LLM for very specific parts of this where we have to interpret language and make decisions. That's the only thing the LLM is doing.

Rick Lindquist

Yep.

Tyler King

I think there's an opportunity there.

Rick Lindquist

I agree. I 100% agree. It's a challenge every day for me is getting to that.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Startup to Last