Matt Cortland’s mom would give him an earful whenever he called home.
“She kept calling us to ask us what we can do about the gas prices in the US,” he told Business Insider in early April when prices were just hitting a $4 a gallon average. “She’d say, ‘It’s just ridiculous.'”
So Cortland and his husband, John Fleming — a postdoctoral researcher focused on AI systems at the University of Oxford — built a website called Gas Index to track prices. They used a smattering of AI tools to help build the website, including a phone bot that has called nearly 20,000 gas stations across the US to request pricing updates.
Cortland and Fleming said they spent about $5,000 and got the site live in a matter of days.
Now, after building a product with AI from scratch, they have a message for students and aspiring engineers: use AI as both a tool and a teacher — and make sure it’s a little rude.
For large language models, they said the key is to prompt them to critique your work, not to agree with it.
“You can tell it, ‘Hey, my friend has an idea, I think it’s really stupid,'” Fleming said. “You fool the AI into thinking that it is doing a good job by giving constructive critiques.”
Cortland said he often asks AI to “explain it to me like I’m an idiot,” while Fleming pushes his models to challenge his assumptions.
“His models are really mean,” Cortland said.
From there, they recommend asking AI to walk them through the step-by-step processes of building software.
“A lot of times, we have it acting as our tutor as we’re building projects,” Fleming said. “For example, it teaches me the best software engineering practices. I’m in academia — but we aren’t engineers. To build that skillset, you can just use AI as a coach. It really accelerates your learning.”
Just as important, they said, is showing what you build to the world. It’s a message that some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names — like LinkedIn’s CEO Ryan Roslansky and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman — have also emphasized.
“We’re trying to help everyone out through a thing that’s bad for everyone,” Cortland said. “It’s a trend of building in public. You have an idea, and you talk about what you used and how you made it. It’s a way to show your chops.”
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