SPEAKER_02 0:00

I see this is the way that the welding industry is going. And people say, well, good luck trying to have it make a railing or go back and do this. Bro, it's going to do that. What if I told you that within the next decade, a one-man welding shop could have the output of a 10-man crew? Sounds crazy, right? But the technology is already here and moving a whole lot faster than people realize. In this episode, I'm joined by Dan from DC Built. And what started out as a conversation about how we're using AR in our businesses quickly turned into a deeper dive into what the future of fabrication, automation, and what welding shops might look like in the years to come. We talked about practical ways we're already using AI today, from creating customer renderings and speeding up design work to building software and automating repetitive tasks. But we also explore into where this technology is headed, how AI, cobots, robotics, and automation will completely change the way fabrication shops operate. The reality is the shops that learn how to use these tools will have a massive advantage over the shops that ignore them. Whether you're excited about AI, skeptical of it, or somewhere in the middle, this conversation will get you thinking about what's possible and how these tools can help make small welding businesses become more efficient, profitable, and competitive. So let's jump into it.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

What do you use AI for? I I mean I'll use it for quick renderings. So if I have a sketch or something, a lot of the stuff that I do is prototype work or it's one-off. And I can draw infusion, but it takes me a while. If I'm just trying to spit something out to a client, I could just you most of the time they have navigate myself through Chat GPT, send it to them. Yeah. And it it'll be close. It'll give them a visual idea. Because a lot of my clients will have a hard time picturing what they want in their head. So it's like I have to kind of draw that out of them. And I've it's been awesome for that type of stuff.

unknown 2:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

See that unable to connect things just pops up again.

unknown 2:08

Oh, weird.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

But you're clear and good to go. Are you still? And it's 98%.

SPEAKER_02 2:13

Okay. We'll just keep rolling.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Cool.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

That is awesome. So explain to me, like, like walk me through your process of how you get a rendering for your customer. Like, it's like just start from the beginning because I don't I don't do that. I don't quite understand it. Talk to me like I'm 12 years old and I need to, you're teaching me how to do this.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

So perfect example. I had a potential client reach out about trophies. Sometimes I'll make custom trophies. I do it for a buddy's my friend of mine has a wild like indoor mini three-wheeler race he runs. But outside of that, I've done some. Yeah, it's it's cool.

SPEAKER_02 2:52

And it's I I have one of those mini three-wheelers. Very freaking awesome. ATC 70 fully restored wheelie bars on it. Like it's it's pretty badass.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

Anyway, I'm gonna connect you. I'm gonna connect you with a couple social media accounts.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

So I make the trophies for that, but I had another client reach out about doing trophies for his event, which is different. And we had talked a little bit, and I I was I wasn't 100% sure if it was gonna go anywhere, so I didn't want to really invest a ton of time into it. So I ended up doing this, I just kept prompting it. And I noticed there's kind of a threshold, but I just use Chat GPT, the paid version, so it has a little bit better uh performances out of it. Yeah, but I will just prompt it and I'll even sketch something and upload the photo of a sketch from my phone and then keep prompting off of that. But I it sounds crazy, but like I've like kind of gone down the rabbit hole of learning how to prompt AI as well, and that's like a completely different black hole of time in its own right. Yes. So it honestly works pretty well. And it listen, it gets you close, right? It doesn't get you exactly what is in your head either as the creator, but it's like, hey, this took me 15 minutes to do. This what do you think? Like, where can we build upon it? Is this kind of the direction you're thinking? Yeah, you're in it. And it's a huge time saver. That's it's cool.

SPEAKER_02 4:19

Awesome. So so talk to me about the prompting part of it because some of the like I learned that you like if you talk to it like a like an employee who just started, so like with you know, people who aren't familiar with AI, if the the more you use it, the more it gets to know about you, and which is which is really the beauty of it. And like right now, I I I use I use uh Claude. I used to use Grok. I don't use Grok anymore, but I use Claude and I use um Chat GPT. And it knows what I do, it knows I have a welding business, it knows I have the Fabricator Olympics and everything like that, the podcast. And um I talk to it like a like an employee who just started, like who knows what I do, but doesn't know how I do it. And like for complicated things like that, um, that app I just told you about with the Spark Social, I went to Claude and I went the actually, I went the chat because I know chat's better at like chat's better at like the the creative things. Um Claude is more like a get it done, like here's the directions on how to do it. And like, at least for mine, how I've taught chat is like it's kind of like a cheerleader slash coach and pretty knowledgeable about everything I do. And um, so I said, hey, I'm looking to make this app. This is what I wanted to do. I want you to make me a prompt to give to Claude. Because I didn't even know what to, I knew like kind of what to give to Claude, but I know that this is such a heavy lift for a co as a for a coding aspect. I'm like, I don't want to spend 30 hours critiquing every little thing because like, oh, I forgot to tell them that. Oh, I forgot to do this. So I said, I'm looking to do this. I don't know what kind of prompt I need to give them. Ask me questions of things that you think that I should give to Claude in my prompt, and then make me a prompt for Claude that I can just copy and paste, and I can have a one-shot deal where it just makes it and there's no back and forth. And it asked me like six questions, it gave me a prompt, and like it took Claude a while. Like, I had to actually upgrade my my plan to like the max plan because I kept timing out of like the cup the the capacity I had. I'd be doing it at like nine, ten o'clock at night. It's like, oh, sorry, you're hitting your max, reset at 2 a.m. And I'm like, bro, I'm not waking up at 2 a.m. to redo this. I'm like, I'm just gonna pay the hundred bucks and do it. So, but like legit, like thinking time, it's probably got an hour and a half of like coding time and it like it corrects itself and does self-checks and stuff like that. So, anyway, um what do you like? Uh explain to me your process of like going down the rabbit hole of how to prompt AI on that.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

So I've found now I I'm just speaking chat GPT, like you said before, I think there's there's different use cases for the different AI platforms, but I'm really only I say experience. I really only have experience in Chat GPT. Okay. But so what I've done in the past is I've done what you said where you basically reverse psychology AI to make it make you a prompt, because I don't know how to reciprocate, like how to verbalize what I'm looking for. But at the same time, I've also asked it to act as uh simply like act as somebody that has 30 years experience coding. What I'm trying to do is this, but and that like kind of kind of build a backstory for it before I ask the question. And I've also found good luck with asking it to cite where it finds this because it'll like send me down a different offshoot or like a different route in the root system to go find more information. Yeah. So that it's it's wild. It really is. It's kind of scary. You know, everybody's all Terminator about it. It's a there's a little bit of that in the back of my mind. But at the same time, I'm like, this is a wildly helpful tool. Yeah, so cool. Oh my gosh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

Um, are you familiar with OpenClaw at all?

SPEAKER_01 8:42

No.

SPEAKER_02 8:43

No.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

What is that?

SPEAKER_02 8:44

Um OpenClaw, so basically, if you think of like Chat GPT as your brain, as as as a a brain, you can talk to it, has theories and things like that. Open claw, like it gives it arms. So open claw is a com it it's it's uh uh it's actually it's kind of if you're not familiar with um with coding or like how computers work, like like me, like me, I have no idea. Like I didn't even like like like I can barely work Excel spreadsheets, seriously. So like I don't have any I'm I'm negative when it comes to like learning how to code and and how computers work. Um so uh Open Claw is a it's a program that basically it gives it like it gives your AI arm so it can go out and do things. So I say, hey, take this post, uh put it uh make me a caption of it, and then post it on the Facebook. Um it sounds uh fantastic. It sounds like my gosh, this is next level. Well, the problem is is that uh it can't reach out to Facebook and do that. It can reach out to another platform like Blotato or Buffer, and those are other websites that will you'll they'll take all your social media and they'll take it and they'll they'll post it for you. So they have like what's called API keys. API keys is like you know, you think if you think about like your chat GPT that you go to chatgppt.com, that's like the front door, yeah. Like the like the the API keys is how like the professionals get in in the back door. And but like they charge you so like the front end you pay like 20 bucks a month and that's it. Well, API keys you actually pay per usage, it's like fractions of a penny, but like anyway, so you have to set up a whole lot of stuff on the back end, and like because I don't know anything about that, I'm using uh either Chat GPT or uh Claude to walk me through that. The problem is those those those uh those systems they want to please you, they want to give you the results. So they sometimes it's called AI hallucination. It says that you can do things, but you actually can't. Like it'll give you directions on how to do things. But like you say, I can't find that menu. Explain it to this to me. Oh, sorry, that menus change. I'm looking at an old version, like you know, you're gonna have to look for something like this. Or sometimes it just straight up hallucinates altogether. Like, I actually stopped using open call because uh I can't train it well enough to um to to just not give me bull crap answers. Yeah, like I'll be like, you know, um, actually, let me see if I can pull it up right now. Um, so you use something called tell like so from you use telegram or whatsapp to um to communicate with it. So that's the interface you use. You don't go to like you don't it doesn't have an app. Really? You you download Telegram and you connect Telegram to it. So you can upload files to it and it can give you files and excuse me, things like that. So like I asked it how to do things, and um, let me see if I can find a uh an example of where it just straight up lied to me.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Um I know what you mean though, as far as like the dead ends, and sometimes I'm trying to think of a specific case and I can't, but it recently happened where it was a rel, it was a very long conversation prompt that I had been dealing with, like a couple days, and we kind of went full circle and it told me it couldn't do something that it has already done. Yeah, I was like, oh, this is it was simple. It was like I wasn't asking it, it was something to do with, oh man, I like three MF files and changing some of my like a design file to a different style of thing so I can compress it. And I'm like, wait a minute, I've done this before. Like, and then I scrolled out like a thousand pages, and I said, wait a minute, we did this in the beginning. Like, I know this is possible.

SPEAKER_02 13:06

Well, so the thing is is that open claw is supposed to, because so like um like chat p Chat GPT, it runs on their cloud, their server. Okay. Open claw, you need to have a designated computer in your house for it to to to run. So it doesn't, it's not something like so. I had to take an old computer, wipe it, make sure it could actually run it, and it does. Um, but the idea with open claw is that it doesn't forget those things. So, like I'm working with my buddy Burton. Um, he he told me he's like, you know, it'll it'll be like, you know, me and Dan had it like right now, we're having a conversation and we remember we remember the details. When I talk to you in a week, it'll we'll we'll remember that we had this conversation about AI, but we won't remember the details of it. And that's kind of what it does. Once you get so so deep into a conversation, it has to push out some memory so that it can keep on going. Well, the open claw doesn't do that, it keeps it all Azure, like it's basically a brain, a smart brain that's on a computer. Um, but like I asked it to uh man, give me one sec. I want to find this.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Um like I'm I'm envisioning almost like an external hard drive for a AI conversation.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

Oh, here we go. So here's what here's what we did. Um like I'm a very visual person. And so I like Chat GBT and how it has like the all the side conversations that you've that you've had previously, and you just click back into one and you pick up where you left off. And um Open Claw doesn't have that. Um I asked it, I'm like, hey, you know, um I I so you have to give it a name. I gave I gave mine Cooper. Said, hey Cooper, if I wanted to have a way where I could go back and see the conversation threads like on the sidebar of Chat GPT and other models, how would I go about doing that with you? Great question, Kevin. To have a several conversation is uh conversation thread similar to how we have OpenRye managed them, blah, blah, blah. It tells me here's how we can set that up. And it gives me three different ways to set it up. I said, yeah, let's do that. Let's start a new session for the fabricator Olympics. It looks like I can't start a new session in this session mode without making a new thread. This is usually persistent for background tasks. And I'm like, okay, let's do that. I'm encountering an issue to create a new session for Fabricator Olympics. It seems the environment I'm in does not fully support thread colon true option for subgates, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, so it just straight up lied to me. It gave me, yeah, right. It gave me three ways to do it. I said, okay, let's do it. I'm having an issue. Okay, let's do let's do this instead. Actually, I I have another issue. I can't actually do that. So like my open claw is not very uh I I it's actually kind of almost unusable um at this point. Like, give it like six months, it'll probably be ridiculously better. Right. But I'm having that issue right now. Um but uh anyway, to bring that around, AI is freaking awesome.

SPEAKER_00 16:32

And um I'm gonna be a bunch of welders would be talking about this, right?

SPEAKER_02 16:36

Dude, I'm geeking out, I've been geeking out on this for about five or six months right now. And like, because I see this is the way that um the welding industry is going. And I, you know, people say, Oh, well, good luck trying to have it make a railing or uh go back and and do this. Bro, it's going to do that. I promise you, like, I was just talking um like yesterday um with another guest, and I'm like, give it like three to five years, and a somebody like who knows how to do this, you you're gonna be able to give it, upload a book of AWS codes. You're gonna have that, you'll be able to have an interface to your your your laser welder, and it's gonna just that just hooks to a cobot arm. You're gonna take, you know, probably in your your blueprints, it'll say, you know, this, like I need you to weld, I need to weld here, here, here, here, here, and here. It's gonna understand the thickness of it because of the drawings, like how thick your beam is, how thick your knife plate is, how thick your pickets and your top rail and bottom rail are. And it's gonna say, okay, I've encountered this before. Go back to the AWS code book. What do I need to be set at at the welder for this? Okay, you know, I have a visual eye. Like apparently the eye thing, like the seeing part, is like the hard part. Um, I know that there's 15 pickets here. Let's go ahead and weld those pickets out. This is my setting. This is the way I need to hold it to travel because it's already learned that. Like it knows, like, you know, if you have a book of settings or a PDF of settings for that come from Theo from the laser weld company, or even if it's Pulse Big or Tig or whatever, you've got your settings. The it knows those settings because it has it in its memory. Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Yeah, it's a learned memory, right?

SPEAKER_02 18:31

Yeah, it's gonna learn the memory of like, hey, this is a square picket going into a piece of flat bar or channel. There is a gap here. This is what my settings have to be to fill this gap. You know what I mean? That is not that far away. It's just gonna take somebody to do it. And it's gonna be really clumsy and clunky for a couple years. But once you get it, give it like two or three years after you get started. It's gonna be viable to like for you know, some of these shops that are doing like cutting edge stuff with laser scanning and you know, cobots right now, they're gonna be the first ones to adopt this and say, here's a picture of my drawing. Um, you know, that take it from Tekla or Fusion or AutoCAD, whatever SOLIDWORKS, give it to it and say, You've seen this before. This is this is what has to happen, make it happen, and it'll go out there and do it. And then you I'm I'm imagine just putting that on a rotisserie where it, you know, so somebody lays it out, you bolt it down to it, and it tacks it all in place, and then it just welds out one side or the other so that it doesn't warp from side to side. Like, yeah, it's coming. It's coming. People say it's not it's not coming for our jobs, but I'm telling you, it's it's gonna be small jobs, it's small job shops really, really efficient.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

I had this conversation with somebody at work where like it was an older, older carpenter guy, you know, very set in his ways, awesome guy, extremely talented. And everything is like it's oh, it's an AI drawing. This is that, but but they'll they'll never be able to do this or like do what we do. And I I didn't want to go down the rabbit hole with him, but I was thinking about just material handling and like the solutions I've seen online, okay, or at Fab Tech, where you've seen those brakes that have I don't know how it works, but there's like a table of fingers in front of it, and it can spin the material and reposition the material. What's to say that can't offload a sheet from there that is now bent? Put it on one of the anything, any sort of material, whether it's a lime or one of those tracked robots that brings it to wherever, puts it onto the welding bench, and now it's perfectly oriented every single time, and now it has an arm, like a feral arm looking cobalt welder. Yep. And what's to say it couldn't just weld that whole thing out and send it to the next process. Like, totally see that as being a viable thing within our lifetime for sure.

SPEAKER_02 20:54

Oh, lifetime for sure. So yeah, I feel like it's gonna be like how um, you know, back in like I don't know, 2018, 2019, like when I went to Fab Tech and I had these dreams of like, you know, things like actually almost like this. Like, you know, it it be able to sense where the welds have to go and things like that, and they're you know, like cameras and whatnot. Um, this was just like a I I mean, people are doing that now. So like that is a thing that can be out there. It can't do it through AI and just you speaking to it. Right. You have to program it how to do that. I believe that the programming and the AI is gonna close the gap in between that. But then you're also gonna have like, you know, eight, six, seven, eight years ago, those things were a million dollars to have it turnkey. I was at FabTech two years ago, and that the same idea of what could have that uh that like could implement my ideas, so $150,000 turnkey. Right. Like that's like one tenth of like almost one tenth of uh of the price. So once you get this, and and so I don't know if the if the technology of using AI and knowing how to prompt AI is gonna like level the playing field a little bit more. I think it might, because before like you know, if you think about it, back in 2018, only computer programmers and people who knew how to have those robots talk to each other could make that work.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 22:27

Uh and then China figured it out, there's US-based support here, and the machines are, you know, one-tenth the price. Yeah. Um, with the age of vibe coding and speak texting and like clawed code, you can I I I I I think it's not gonna be it goes from a million dollars and you have to wait six years for it to drop to one-tenth the price. I think it's gonna stay really affordable for job shots. It's not gonna be the guy in in his garage going out there and investing $400,000 in machines. But I think it is gonna be like these companies who have 10 guys and and even smaller, because I like the fact of doing more with less, like, why hire three guys if you could invest you know, take out a loan for $200,000, set this stuff up in your shop, and have it run. And all you have to do is like feed it material, maybe if it doesn't already get the material for itself and program it. You know what I mean? Like, I so I see in 20 years, guys like you and I can be putting out out like the output that we could do will be ten times what one person could do just because you know, we have the machines that are able to, you know, we know how to code it because we can just speak to it now. Right. Like the interface is easy. Crazy. Like, um, yeah, anyway, like that's just I'll get off my soapbox now, but uh that's my that's my my summary of how this this AI is gonna how AI is gonna fit into the small welding business community.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

And I I mean another thing that you touched on there too, that that's helped really small guys like myself is that trickle down technology is now affordable. Like, I think 10 years ago, I saw a plasma table. I'm like, man, that would be so cool to have. That would that would be amazing. Like, but I can't afford that. Now you can get a plasma table for next to nothing, realistically speaking. Like I have a CNC plasma table, small one, and uh, it was it's a Langmir crossfire. It does what I needed to do. And I hate the thing now, I love it, but I hate, I'm like, ah, it's dirty antiquated technology. I can draw something, send it out to laser, and it shows up. Like, this is amazing. And now I'm like, I need a laser table. Like but and even to that respect, they're so much more affordable now, too. Like, don't get me wrong, it's a lot of money. But when you're looking at it, you're like, man, it's not a million dollar piece of equipment anymore.

unknown 25:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

But so hopefully the AI still brings good tools down to us too. As much as I love my manual tools, I do love my automated tools too.