Airbnb Changes, AI Agents, and Smarter Vacation Rentals with Trevor

JJ: All right, we're back with another week of All Booked Podcast. We've got Trevor joining us this week, which we're super stoked about. Got Michael joining us from the high seas of of a Disney cruise and and and then we've got Jack and I in our normal places. What's what's going on everybody?

Michael: Normal places wor worse internet, maybe?

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: So we

Jack Zoppa: Well

JJ: we had some some big news happen yesterday with Airbnb rolling out some new policies. they say they're they're they're pushing for for no portals whatsoever. so that is an interesting twist. No rental agreements and no checkout chores.

Jack Zoppa: Wait, what do you mean no portals?

JJ: What do you guys think about that? So the let me see, let me pull up the exact verbiage that they that they said here. No, it's a it's a big it's a

Michael: Jack's like, wait a minute, what do you what do you mean no damage waivers?

JJ: big difference. So they said that y you can use a portal, but it can't be required for check-in. So like the the check-in code needs to be accessible elsewhere. So like the guest

Jack Zoppa: Gotcha.

JJ: can't be forced to use your portal in order to get the check-in message.

Jack Zoppa: So you just have to text them or something, the code.

Trevor: Yeah, we already

Jack Zoppa: Hmm.

JJ: Which is interesting because

Trevor: have it set up that way.

JJ: Trevor, like always, is ahead of the curve, right? Trevor, you want to talk

Trevor: Ha ha.

JJ: about your your mindset on portals and guest codes and and kinda where you ended up.

Trevor: Yeah, w well, I think if we had a branded account, it would make a lot more sense and make things a lot easier for us. But we have like forty different Airbnb accounts that are all just normal people. So we had tried out portals early on and we had pretty bad feedback right away from guests, so I like quickly stripped that away. I mean we still use it for everything non Airbnb, but we just send them their instructions directly and then we have we send them a link for the portal for So they're like, Hey, you can use this if you wanna like swipe to unlock or whatever.

but we don't make them do any type of verification, waiver, or anything like that.

JJ: And so you're not doing damage waivers on Airbnb right now, are you?

Trevor: No, no.

JJ: Gotcha. That's that's gonna be a big change for us, and that's something we're still trying to navigate right now because damage waivers are a huge revenue source for us, and if we need to turn those off on Airbnb, that will definitely be a bummer.

Jack Zoppa: You don't to turn off. Do you?

JJ: Well the the verbiage said that you can't use you can't require them to use a portal.

Jack Zoppa: Well it says most hosts most hosts still

Trevor: Yeah, you could make it an optional.

JJ: You can't require them Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: can't charge a deposit. The damage goes through air cover, whatever. Hosts connected through property management software can still collect one if it's disclosed like in the listing. which is where that should be. Like you should be able to have that disclosed in the listing that it's like, hey, we require this example and here's where you access that whatever it is. So you should be fine on all that. Honestly, the way that I found out about this was JJ texting it to me this morning and then me forwarding that to my team and being like, Did you guys know about this?

JJ: I saw it on LinkedIn this morning. So I am also not not super informed yet. But I think it will be interesting to see how how this progresses, especially because I I know a couple of months ago this happened, a similar thing happened and you know all of the portal softwares were all scrambling. so we'll see, you know, as since this is still super new, kind of how this plays out with all of those softwares, because there's gonna need to be some features added in some of these softwares if if we do need the capability to send the

Trevor: Mm-hmm.

JJ: code as a message rather than requiring them to do the portal. I think it also opens up some interesting

Michael: Yeah.

JJ: things for for like now they're not signing your rental agreement, you know, so now it's opening up potential for liability there if you're not getting the same rental agreement stuff signed.

Trevor: Do do you guys feel like you

Michael: Yeah, one part

Trevor: actually need that though on Airbnb with their agreement they already have with the with the guests?

JJ: We have some like HOAs require it. So I and that was one of the things that that it said was like if if an HOA or a city law requires it, you can still do it. So I think we'll be okay for some of the HOA stuff. But I think, you know, we've had knock on wood, but we've had pretty good experience with Airbnb and air cover and that sort of thing. So I I am happy that it's Airbnb pushing this out and not another platform that doesn't have as good of post coverage. so yeah. Michael, you were gonna say something?

Jack Zoppa: Dude, my the audio can't get through to Michael 'cause he's a hundred thousand miles deep in the Pacific Ocean right now. So he he's just here to listen and have a good time.

Michael: I have no idea if I'm just gonna get cut out of this entire podcast or not. But

JJ: Yeah.

Michael: one one one part that I reached out to to Simon at Sweet Up 'cause I know they also had some stuff already kind of baked in there with what they had on their portals and kind of his feedback was a lot of this stuff isn't new. Like they had these kind of things in there already for Airbnb. But they kind of reworded some of them. And then the other part is if your rental agreement with your your homeowners, your contracts with your homeowners requires this thing, that's actually another way to, you know, it's a contract you already have with your homeowners that says you need security deposits or rental agreements or those kind of things can help you, you know, make sure you're actually compliant instead of just relying on the HOA stuff.

So

Trevor: Mm.

Michael: I feel like that'll actually help us a bunch because I don't know, we've kind of relied on our rental agreements more and more as hey, this is the contract we have with our homeowners. Sorry to say Mr. Marketing Platform or like this is you know what we have to abide by with our homeowners or our local municipalities or HOAs and that kind of stuff. So yeah. I know at first the f when JJ when you sent that to me, I was like, no. Like that's like the you know, a large incentive for property managers is having security deposits and damage waivers.

That would be

JJ: Yeah. Yeah. No, that's that's a great point

Michael: drastic change.

JJ: about saying, you know, the the part about saying that it's in your homeowner management agreement and we'll have to

Trevor: Mm-hmm.

JJ: see if that suffices with with Airbnb to waive it.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. And then I think we have it disclosed everywhere, but it's more maybe like the dotting your I's and crossing your T's about where it needs to be disclosed and then being able to like check it off in your software. I know Trevor's built his own stuff, or if you're using Conduit or SweetOp or one of the other ones, making sure like, hey, if this is using some kind of variable, if this is already approved or they've done these other things, like be able to send the message in the Just in the messages, which Trevor you already have, right?

Like you're not making them go to a specific portal to see their check-in instructions or their lock code.

Trevor: No, not for Airbnb. Th yeah, this doesn't really apply to us at all. But yeah, I mean here's the thing with everything that Airbnb does with this kind of stuff. I think it's to like stop the people who are abusing and they they know that it's like pretty flimsy and kind of impossible to fully enforce and just like you're saying, it's like, well we do have a contract with our homeowner or has a property manager, so you can really produce any type of documentation that would be able to get you through that I'm sure.

JJ: So if somebody has

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, I think they're just trying to re

JJ: to make like bulk changes, this I feel like this is a great segue into talking about technology and AI. How how would you go about doing that if you have to update your listings or go change your policies on Airbnb, that sort of thing?

Michael: Step one, you post a job on online jobs dot ph and then you wait a few weeks for a few thousand applicants and you train them on how to do it all. Or you spin up T three code and Trevor has like fifteen subscriptions that does it all for him.

Jack Zoppa: Mm-hmm.

Trevor: Yeah, I mean th it's actually I mean it'd be super easy. You guys already know, like you would just go in, API, update it through your PMS, guest D, whatever it is. Or if it has to be done directly on the Airbnb platform, just have Codex do with computer use or use a GrocBot or whatever you want to use. So Yeah, that kind of stuff, like bulk editing is like super easy to do. Now. It used to be horrible.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, I mean

Trevor: Used to never get done.

Jack Zoppa: GPT six. Like Astra with full access computer use can just like go through for like two hours and like make every change and then you can have it check itself. It's like yeah, super, super good.

JJ: Trevor, I I think I have even more respect for your unofficial guest D C L I now that the official guest EMCP has dropped because

Trevor: Ha ha.

JJ: it's so good, it like actually works. Whereas I I don't know, Michael, if you've used the the guest EMCP yet. One, it's read only, but two, it seems like it's requiring you to like consistently re verify based on the the 24 hour OAuth token.

Trevor: Mm.

Michael: Machiash.

JJ: And it also requires you to instead of having like a login to link with Guesty, it requires API access and different API tokens for each user. So like at that point you might as well just do the unofficial Trevor's unofficial

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: C CLI. So maybe we'll put that in the show notes and and share with people if anybody wants access to that.

Trevor: Yeah, I think I wanna update it to where 'cause like for our team, obviously the way Guestie works with their tokens where it's like it only lasts for twenty four hours and you only have a certain amount, like either five or however many you have on your account. So the way that the CLI is set up right now is that like each user on their machine would put in their own token, but I wanna make it so it can call like a database token instead of like relying on on its own. So that way you can basically do it for your full team instead of just yourself.

JJ: Yeah. Yeah. I I you know, and I think that's one of the great things about Guesty or any PMS that has open API too, is that like you can just build your own stuff and you don't have to rely now on waiting for them to release a certain feature because you can just build around what they already have.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, I agree. I mean I think like building your own CLIs is actually pretty underrated. And if you're I I I don't think I told the story in the pod before, but I had a whoop for a long time. I remember I'd sent it to Trevor. I like built a CLI for the whoop band and to like pull all my data out of whoop. I don't you know, I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't be saying this on a podcast, but it's pretty crazy.

Michael: Ha ha.

Jack Zoppa: Like that I was like so annoyed at the

Michael: It's your data. It's your data.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, yeah. I was so annoyed at the Whoop app how it was working and I like, I wonder if I could build a C L I for this and I yeah, it probably took me like one day to do it. And then I was able to like put that in a local agent workflow every day. You know, like run the C L I workflow and everything and like pull all my stuff out. it's it's pretty wild.

Trevor: Yeah, and I've been hacking TVs.

Michael: You know the one

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Michael: let's go.

JJ: T Trevor, tell us tell us about that. The the TV stuff is so sick. Tell tell the listeners what you got going on.

Michael: Now I just I'm I'm so mad that we put

Trevor: Yeah.

Michael: I'm so mad we put Roku TVs everywhere now that Trevor figured out how to hack Android TVs.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. I I think

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: I think you I think you could find a so I'm working on my LG right now 'cause my main T V at my house is an LG T V. but you have to it's a little more involved. Like you're like doing like a root thing and like literally like fully hacking into it where Android TVs let you do a custom launcher, so it's actually really easy to do. You can do it over Wi Fi. It took like it was it was like one of the only times of my life that I've had a genuine one shot experience where I was like turned my Sony Android T V into Apple T V launcher and it did it and then I was like, I gotta start building this out for our units too.

So now it's like hooked up to our back end and I s I ordered there was only like seven of the Google TVs available on Amazon when I looked, but

Michael: You bought all of them?

Trevor: I bought all, yeah. The I I'm gonna so like you can set up Tail Scale on the Android TVs and then I'm gonna have a dashboard in our ops tool that is like tracking all of them and it will auto log in like YouTube T V 'cause that's what we use for cable if it ever logs itself out instead of like waiting for them and then it'll log out the guests out of their personal logins after each day. So then those aren't stay locked th those don't stay logged in. but then another like side thing is we don't have like a pimped out Wi Fi setup that like Michael has with all the, you know, ubiquity stuff and all his units.

So Wi-Fi is always such a pain in not being able to monitor it. But now that we're connecting to TVs over Tail Scale, I can like have a Wi-Fi monitoring dashboard and our ops tool that uses the TVs, which are always connected to Wi-Fi. So that was like a side thing.

JJ: I love that. I was I was literally while you were talking about that, I was thinking about that in the back of

Michael: That's a

JJ: my head about that would be a great Wi Fi monitoring tool.

Trevor: Yeah, yeah. So

Michael: Yeah, 'cause you're always trying to find one one device in the property that's like always on and your locks don't really work because you would just like cook the

Trevor: Yeah.

Michael: batteries if it was always pinging.

Trevor: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and it's

Michael: And then

Trevor: nice because you can literally like you're installing Tailscale on the actual T V itself, so it's like super reliable and it works well and it's not very

Michael: Mm.

Trevor: hacky. Like it took s took five minutes to set up. So the goal is once those come in, I'll get it to where it's like you can plug it in, get it downloaded, the our like software on there right away, and then since Tailscale will be on each of them, we can do over the air updates to the launcher if we ever want to and and change it. From our office.

Michael: That's super cool. I mean, we were texting a little bit about it. You were did you did you are you now s creepily looking up what everyone's favorite band is and when they enter their code in the door it turns on the TV? Cause we used to just leave the TVs playing Frank Sinatra just all the time. But like

Jack Zoppa: Mm-hmm.

Michael: they would time out, they would time

Trevor: Yeah.

Michael: out and like after four hours, so it really only worked for same day turns. And otherwise they would just walk in and there's just like a random Roku screensaver on the TV. Like is there a way with what you've built to get around that?

Trevor: Yeah, well, since the T V is always on and it's just like off because the like it's still connected to Wi Fi, so you can actually turn the TV on through Tail Scale and through the connection that you build. so it'd be really you

Michael: So it just turns on in the middle of the night.

Jack Zoppa: Ha ha ha.

Trevor: I know, that's one thing. It's like obviously making sure that doesn't happen. I mean I wouldn't be like if it happened to a couple of guests, I would just be like, Whoa, that's crazy, I have no idea how that how that

Michael: Ha ha ha ha.

Trevor: happened. So weird.

JJ: love that though, 'cause then now it's kind of the same thing as like, you know, smart thermostats and that kind of stuff. So it's like, hey, two hours before check in or an hour

Trevor: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: Hmm.

JJ: before check-in, go ahead and turn this on. And plus now they have the personalized experience on the T V too.

Trevor: Yeah, and it's cool too because like our smart locks, thermostats or whatever are all connected to our op system, which I can project on the T V so they can control the thermostat from the T V in our custom launcher. You know? Yeah. Yeah,

JJ: that's so cool.

Michael: that is so cool.

Trevor: yeah, i it can do anything. So

Michael: What about what about some anti party stuff? Like, you know, I know you've had some ragers in Portland. The the T V just

Trevor: Mm.

Michael: switches to get out of my house like Blair.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: That's actually really good idea. That's a really good idea. Or if it like I mean, I'm sure that we would get like raging one star reviews if if we did that, but like put a noise monitor connected to it and if it's over certain decibels, like turn on the TV and flash red and tell to quiet down or something.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Michael: It it just switches to like the bad boy's cop song just blaring.

Trevor: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: You just turn the heat up to like ninety five. Everybody out

Michael: Ha ha ha.

Trevor: That's actually a really good idea.

Michael: my gosh.

Trevor: W if yeah, get a noise noise monitor if it goes over a certain point, just turn the heat up and lock the thermostat so they can't change it. god, that's funny.

Michael: That is man. Well, sweet.

JJ: So this is right now, Trevor, this is only on Android TVs and you're working on LG TV, right?

Trevor: Yeah, yeah, I'm doing my LG. It's actually it's working on it right now, so that you ha some of them, like with the LG, Cloud like Opus four five point five won't do it 'cause it is like flagging its security review that you're trying to hack something. so I had that one do it with GPT six point one soul and it's willing to do it. But

JJ: I was gonna say I saw I was reading online, I saw that Codex seems to not care about security issues, whereas Claude

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah.

JJ: seems very like

Jack Zoppa: Makes sense.

JJ: standard moral ground kind of stuff.

Trevor: Yeah. Well I also got

Jack Zoppa: Codex hacked hugging face and I was like, might as well hack every LG known to man.

Trevor: Yeah. I got I got access to Daybreak, like the project daybreak thing. So like you have to buy like a physical flash drive that plugs into your computer to get access to it. but it's like their cyber model. So like you c I'm not using that for this, but I'm just saying like yeah, Codex,

Jack Zoppa: For codecs? How'd you do that?

Trevor: you just apply online, it's super easy. You have to buy the little flash drives like sixty bucks.

Jack Zoppa: Yo, I am getting apply. I'm doing it Did you do individual or enterprise? We're doing this live on the pod. Alright.

Michael: Ha ha ha.

Trevor: I I I always do individual for stuff. I I try not to overcomplicate things. yeah, clo

Jack Zoppa: Here we go, baby.

Trevor: clot so Christian from conduit, he just got the mythos access because if you've solved a bug before, you have to like there's like documentation. I don't know exactly what it is, but you have to apply for it. It's a lot harder than the project daybreak. Like for daybreak you just need the flash drive that you have to buy and then prove that you're like a US citizen and stuff like that. But

Jack Zoppa: For daybreak, what

Trevor: I'm trying to figure out

Jack Zoppa: what model do you get if you if you get in? Is it just like Astra on

Trevor: I can't remember what they call it.

Jack Zoppa: like on else whatever?

Trevor: Yeah, I can't remember what they call it. my flash drive hasn't come in yet. I think it comes

Jack Zoppa: Okay.

Trevor: in like today or tomorrow.

Michael: What what are what are some of the use cases you're looking forward to trying out with it? Is it just simply a more powerful model or

Jack Zoppa: Well, Michael got hacked, so he really wants to know. Yeah.

Trevor: I Yeah, I I'm gonna run it I'm gonna run it through all of our repos and make sure all of our stuff's super

Michael: Yeah.

Trevor: secure and have it find every possible vulnerability. I mean it's you know, it's better than any human coder ever. So like it's gonna find more bugs and vulnerabilities than any engineer. So I'm just gonna have it run through and do like deep dives into like our State Portland website, our ops tool, anything that might have sensitivities or like You know, there's there's money flowing these things, there's stripe integration, so just really

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: dial in and make sure that we're protected because as the models get better, people like if China drops a model that compares to it or whatever and it doesn't have the same guardrails, then I mean it's one of those things where it's like

Jack Zoppa: Speaking of

Trevor: hacking's gonna get really, really, really, really, really good, really, really, really, really fast. But then also protective measures are gonna get really, really good, really, really, really fast. So it's like you kinda have to be the first one to do it. And I saw Some major company got hacked like yesterday. I can't remember what it is. I'll see if I can find it on Twitter.

Jack Zoppa: Speaking of getting access to things, yesterday I texted you guys, my Muse got me access to the DoorDashes MCP. Now I'm all dialed in. Before it was having to go through browser use and logged in session and order me things. Got me MCP access. Just immediate stuff to my house. It's beautiful.

JJ: You just got that for Chipotle ordering. Don't lie.

Michael: It's just Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah. It literally popped up on my phone. Literally popped up my phone today that was like, Do you want your usual burrito? is what I said. I was like, dang It was cool 'cause I was at one of my friend's offices and he had this like cool camera and his setup that I wanted. I have it plugged in now. But I was there, so I took a picture of it and I sent it to Muse and I was like, I want this at my house when I get there. And then I left and I got there and Best Buy delivered it to my door. I was like, dang, that's crazy.

Trevor: JJ, your dog's right there, it's hilarious.

JJ: I know, I know. He's got a cone on right now too, poor guy. so

Trevor: so it's PHP that got hacked. I don't know what that is. But apparently it's a huge deal.

JJ: I think that's Shopper, I appreciate you mentioning that though, because I think that that's gonna be super common that there's gonna be more and more hacks and especially for builders like us, you know, we need to make sure that whatever we're building is super secure and like we also don't know what the hell we're doing in in a in a general sense. So having having an AI specifically for security, I think is super important.

Trevor: Hundred percent, yeah.

Jack Zoppa: Trevor, do you have a like agent harness built

JJ: No.

Jack Zoppa: out for cybersecurity right now?

Trevor: No, I just use I mean right I I use I mean I'm either on Codex, Claude Code.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: I use Grockbot for some random stuff, I use Muse for random stuff. So but most of my like actual work I'm doing on a day to day basis is either codex or cloud code. So like T three code is nice because it's not its own like custom harness. It's actually just wrapping those harnesses and then They have like their own orchestration layers. So like if it's if you have Opus five point five doing something but you want it to do like codex reviews, it'll actually like run the Codex CLI to review it. so my sessions run way longer, but like the end products have been a lot better and like more like it finds so many more bugs than where like I feel like when I was just in my world on my terminal using cloud code,

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: I would ship stuff maybe faster, but like a lot of the bugs and things would just like slowly come over time so now I can kinda like give it a very detailed outline of what I'm wanting the end result to be and how much work I want it to do and how to test for it and and whatnot and then let it cook and then you know sometimes it takes longer than I want it to and I'm just like, What's taking so long? But then it it's always a lot better at the end of it, so

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

JJ: So break that down a little bit more because I'm definitely curious, you know, with with my workflow, I'm doing a lot of just cloud code and like we have a bunch of tests built out inside of State OS, which we're building. So it's like it'll do the unit tests for whatever like module that we're building on to make sure that whatever you're pushing isn't conflicting. But like explain how you have that set up with T3 and like what the codex review agent does is which is different than what like the tests would be pushing the GitHub and that kind

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: of stuff.

Trevor: Yeah, so my my setup right now is I have my old MacBook, which I honestly should probably swap them until my studio comes in in a couple weeks, but I have a computer at my house here, it's right next to me. It's plugged in all the time, it's always on. It can never turn off. If it restarts for any reason, it instantly connects to Wi Fi and will restart itself. and that runs two things. It runs all my sessions. through tail scale and T3 code, and then it also has a CLI proxy built into it. So the reason that's nice is because when I used to only use the terminal and the COD code CLI for everything or codec CLI, A, you're having to bounce back and forth.

So it's annoying. Like it's just not convenient. And then I'm doing so much stuff that I I run out of my usage on my subscriptions often. Like I have to to sign out of every single session I'm in. Re-log in on Cloud Code, go back in, do it. so it always just a huge pain. So what the CLI proxy is, is essentially you log in on this machine at my house to all your subscriptions. So I have like five Cloud Code subscriptions, I have three codec subscriptions, everything is through that. And then it basically manages the usage on Cloud Code through T3 and also on my computer, my MacBook.

So if I want to spin up like a local session of claw code, it'll still use that CLI. And it's a little wonky because it looks like you're connected to API, but you're not. You're still connected to your the CLI proxy and you're only using your subs

JJ: That that was gonna be my question, is you're still using your subscription and not API through that.

Trevor: Yeah. It's just it's mana so it manages like your five hour limits, your weekly limits. it's been great. I mean I've been cooking hard for like four days and I have not had to even think about my accounts. Like I don't know what usage is where or what's using what. and you know, I have five right now, maybe I'll cut that down to like four once I like work through some stuff I'm working on, but it's like not I d I don't really have to think about it.

JJ: How do you manage like you're doing multiple things at once? That's something that I've been running into now that I've been like trying to cook more. Is like, okay, I've got you know five or six different features that I'm like thinking about or pushing and like they're pushing different PRs, and like how do you keep it from like conflicting PRs or yeah, or or like even keeping up with it? Because that's the other thing. It's like I'll forget,

Jack Zoppa: You have to ha you have to have the mind the mind of Trevor to be able to handle thirty different projects.

Trevor: Ha ha.

JJ: I'll I'll be you know, working on this one feature and then something else comes up and I'll forget to tell it to merge and then all of a sudden I've just got this like one branch sitting there that never got merged. So like have you worked through that in your process?

Trevor: Yeah, I mean I think on like a high level, for the most part, I have so so much trust in how I'm prompting and the testing environments that I've set up for Cloud Code and Codex to where like I get full access and I have it merge right away. Like all most of our stuff is internal and no one like we don't have a PR reviewing system. Like I don't have Hayden looking at the stuff that I merge or he looks at the stuff or I look at the stuff that he merges. We kind of just both merge in. So if you build like and it's really kind of built into my I guess MD files or or whatever, but the loops that it goes through to like confirm everything's good before merging, I just I just don't really run into like it catches everything faster.

It catches stuff that probably would have never even been found anyways. So my trust, especially more recently with Opus five point five, I mean it's just it's the best model ever. So like I give permission when I initially prompt, like Do these tests, go through it, and once you're done, merge it and deploy it. And then that kinda takes my mind out of it where I used to nurse my sessions a lot more and like check in on them more often. but now I like overnight I always have stuff working. Like I never it's never not working on stuff. So and what's nice too is like everything's running on my other computers, so like the workflow of T three code is where like I don't have to like I used to walk around I I used to have my computer open in my car on my iPhone hotspot while I was driving into work because I was in the middle of something and I didn't want it to stop working while I was going in.

But now I can have

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: everything on my phone, my computer, everything's connected. It's all running locally in one place. and then and T3 code's not the only thing you could do this with. Like there's other solutions too, but that's what I use. And because I'm getting so much more depth into what those sessions are focused on and they're supposed to do and I'm like any additional task, spin off a sub agent, like I I it kind of knows my workflow and how I want it to work. I've reduced the amount of like terminal windows I've had open or like sessions running.

And I've leaned a lot more into trusting the sub agents that it's running off of. And Yeah, I don't know. And I'm just on it all day. So like I nothing can really like slip by me. Like I can see it and like it's kind of like a inbox zero situation where I want to settle all my tabs and get it down to nothing. So like if something's still being worked on and it needs my input, then yeah, of course I'll go in and do that. But more recently I've tested out using like linear and things like that. I would say that I'm like a pretty like I don't use it the way it should be.

I think Claude uses it more than me, honestly. Like I'm not like going into linear and looking at tickets or anything like that. But the idea of it being more of like everything's kind of like an issue or a ticket rather than like you're just creating all these random PRs. I mean there's thousands of PRs that I can't even track or or deal with. So being able to like have everything tracked in linear and then Claud Coder Codex, when it's I give it a new task, it will go through linear and see if there's any open tickets that are like similar to that.

And then it will be like, this one was never closed out. And it will merge it in. so for I guess the less important stuff, like sure, maybe some stuff gets missed at times, but like That wouldn't really happen if it was something that I was like really wanting to get pushed out and and work with.

Jack Zoppa: Trevor, can you can you give like if you can like two or three specific like here's like what I'm building right now? Like here's like what all of this work is doing. I feel like most people are like listening to us and they're like, what could they possibly be doing in their business? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like how do you use that much for a vacation

JJ: What yeah, why does Trevor have five Claude subscriptions? Like what are you building?

Jack Zoppa: real cut? Like I don't understand.

Trevor: Yeah, yeah.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, and like yeah, I'm just curious.

Trevor: Yeah, I mean it's it's crazy. It's crazy 'cause the subsidy I mean, it's the best time in the in the world to be alive right l right now. It's like the best time in history because I'm paying two hundred dollars a month for each of those subs and you get eight thousand dollars worth of tokens each. So I'm I'm using forty thousand dollars a month worth of tokens, essentially if I max out all my subs. So yeah, I mean I'm I really enjoy coding and building stuff for our business and I think that like the best way to that I've found that I can add value to our business is by coding and building tools and new unique solutions that just wouldn't have been possible before.

So I don't know, there's random stuff. Like right now I have a session running on fixing the CLI so it could use the same token for multiple people in one business. So like that's one thing. Or you know, we have our own inbox. So like our support inbox was loading really slowly. So the past day or two I completely reconfigured how the inbox pulls in messages and updates and live updates for the team on the on the actual dashboard.

Jack Zoppa: You should double tap on the inbox. Like you should talk about like what that is. What it what it maybe has has replaced people understand like what you actually built.

Trevor: Yeah, so it started as and I I'll s I guess I'll start by saying I wouldn't recommend necessarily everyone do what I'm doing. I have a disease where like I can't not like build something that I think is interesting and I wanna build. So like that is where all of my time and effort is focused on. But so first, you know, I've cut down to I use two softwares. I use Guestie and I use Conduit. Aside from our internal tools that we have. So I think that for the internal tool, I didn't like that the team had to like go into Guesty and then go into Conduit for all these different things.

And I think that there was a lot of custom features. Like you could build it out using the API for either of those tools. But I think for the most part, the team wants to see that through Most people need to be able to see and touch something through a and like a front end. where it's like, you know, you can't custom code conduit's front end. You can't custom code guests front end. So like I'm gonna create my own front end and then connect all the data in the back end. So it started out first for the inbox where I essentially wrapped conduit in our own tool.

and I did that A Just to keep everything in one place, then B so I could build my own custom features on top of it and maybe ship a little bit faster than a company like Conduit would be able to. so like

Jack Zoppa: Crazy flex. Yeah.

Trevor: Well, I'm one person. Like I it's it's just not even comparable. I love conduit. But but yeah, so like an example of like a feature that I'm talking about is I use the I'm using Clef now. I've tested out like Jev, Clef and the decisions API, but essentially every message that comes in, it like is monitoring that and it's asking, are we approving a refund for this or are we talking about a refund or have we approved a refund? And then if it detects like, yes, this is a conversational, like we're approving a refund or we've communicated with this guest about a refund, it will have a UI pop-up that basically is like a one-click go where an agent will go log into Airbnb and then give that refund to that guest through the resolution center on the back end so the team doesn't have to actually go log in.

So it's like taking the context within the conversation, it's pulling up that pop-up, then the team can just click go. Or they can manually do it. Same thing with special offers. If someone reaches out and asks for a discount and we agree to on both ends to some type of discount, it'll detect that and will say, like, go send special offer. Click yes, and then it will go send special offer to the guests in Airbnb without the team asking to log in. So like little things like that where I'm like, for me logging into Airbnb is like the most brutally waste brutal waste of time that you could possibly do.

Michael: Ha ha ha.

Trevor: And I

Jack Zoppa: Mm-hmm.

Trevor: patiently wait for the time where like their API will be open to be able to do all these things where you no longer have to log in for anything or they'll at least have like an MCP that you can connect to on each account. but until then we have to use their UI and do what they're doing. So that's one example of why I did it. And then the other one is for support tickets, which this is what's really cool about Conduit. If you don't use Conduit, they connect directly with Airbnb as well. So it pulls in all your Airbnb support messages

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: into the inbox. and I have configured this one I'm using Grok for whatever reason. I don't know why. Sometimes I just in the moment decide to choose a specific harness or model. But on this specific inbox, I have our support inbox where the Airbnb messages through actual Airbnb are only one half the equation. The other half are the emails that they send. when for whatever reason they don't want to use the inbox. I don't know what their like comp their reasoning is by that, but certain things get escalated Yeah.

Michael: It's just like it it's just like yours using Grok just randomly.

Trevor: Yeah, it's like, yeah, let's make this super s important message that has to get to this host or we're gonna shut down their listing, send into an inbox with forty different accounts and thousands of emails so they don't see it. So that has happened to us too many times, so I was like, Okay, I need to figure out a way to like basically contact match and r and route in all of those emails for each host and have those built into the context of all these support tickets. So I built that out as well, which is was really helpful and nice. and then Groc is like specifically trained it's based on OpenClaw on how to deal and respond to these Airbnb support tickets.

So depending on the situation, it will go check the context with the guest or our team's context and if we have approved a refund, then it will approve that. If we haven't or we've denied it, it'll tell Airbnb support that we deny it and if it needs a human then it will escalate it. So

JJ: Grockbot's been good with logging into Airbnb and stuff, no issues.

Trevor: well that one's not Grocbot. That's that's like that's just it responding. So like that is basically just Yeah, yeah. So

JJ: gotcha. What are

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, what harness is

JJ: what agent are you using to log into

Jack Zoppa: that? You said it's ba

JJ: Airbnb?

Trevor: Well, because those come through the Airbnb support messages come through condo, I don't have to. Their API exposes those so I pull them into our inbox

JJ: Hm. Okay.

Trevor: through the API. Yeah.

JJ: Wha what about like for the you said you were like logging into Airbnb for like special offers and refunds and like that kind of stuff?

Trevor: Yeah, that's just a custom agent. It's based off of Codex's computer use. It's using GPT six point one soul and then it's I have like a Hetzner virtual machine that they're all running on and all of our accounts are logged in on it. So it'll just go run and and do that.

Jack Zoppa: Do you host any of your agents locally? Like, you know, as your especially this stuff is like core to the business, like is any of this stuff living on like a Mac somewhere or is it all like cloud based agents?

Trevor: no, everything's everything's cloud based. Yeah. Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: Interesting, yeah, I have obviously we all have like I don't know if some of us haven't used Hermes agents, but we used to use a ton of Hermes agents until like Muse or Grogbot came out, but I still use mine for stuff and I have a Quinn, the three point five model now on my on my Mac mini that I'm like running right now. And so I have a specific harness set up there and I've just been testing it. It's pretty interesting, like You can dial in your harness like really, really well. Then you can run a like lesser model that can still do like a ton of stuff and just do everything locally on on it.

It's interesting. You have a Mac Studio coming in, right?

Trevor: Yeah, I do. Yeah, I my so I think that

Jack Zoppa: Big boy.

Trevor: for me, as long as the like subsidies are there with the found like the the frontier models, I'm always gonna lean towards using the best model possible. So and I don't run a SAS. I have a company that you know, we we have a PM company and we're three hundred units, like for me a two hundred dollar sub is just not Like that's not going across all of our customers. Like that's just for us and the value is really huge there. So like all of our custom open claw tools that I've built that are like either whether it's responding to guests or responding to support tickets or like our internal Slack tool, which is also based on OpenClaw, those are running off of Claude Co like or Catchy PT subscriptions.

So like it's like two hundred dollars maybe a month in total. cost for all of those different tools. I'm not spending the, you know, the individual token costs. If that changed and I got booted off and I had to do that, then I'd be like, okay, I gotta figure out how to do this with like Deep Seek or use a local model or something like that. But I don't know, I just haven't found the need for it 'cause the cost has never been that

Jack Zoppa: Mm-hmm.

Trevor: I it's never felt like the work was worth like it wasn't a needle mover, you know.

Jack Zoppa: So what's the studio for?

Trevor: She is just to run all my sessions. My my RAM maxes out of my computer every

Jack Zoppa: Ha ha ha.

Trevor: five minutes and my storage is full all the time. It's it's brutal.

Jack Zoppa: Which one did you get?

Trevor: I got the I got the max with forty eight gigabytes of RAM and then two terabytes of storage, but I might the the ultra is like mid December delivery and I don't want to wait that

Jack Zoppa: Mm.

Trevor: long. So I think I'm gonna get this and then use it and then once the ultra delivery times go down to like same day or if it's available in stores, I might take this one to the office, give to someone else, and then get a new one that's like a little bit beefier that would be able to run models locally. Or you know.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, I want the one twenty eight gig RAM Ultra.

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: You can run a local model on it? Is that the is that the goal?

Jack Zoppa: Yeah. Yeah. I think you can run like a sonnet level, like maybe like right under Sonnet five five level, like super good model that but also I just want the studio basically for what Trevor's saying, like I hit RAM like once a day. I feel like everything's dying. And then I have to have my local other than my GrocBot can do It'd be like, all right, fix my RAM and it'll go through my Mac and like turn off random stuff and like optimize the Mac again.

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah, it's super annoying. Same thing with like how many CPU cores you have, because like each task that's going is using up one of those cores, so like it'll literally have no other apps on it. Like it'll just have sessions running on it. and that chip is like super OP. So

Jack Zoppa: So what we're saying is we're gonna start our own data center business. And then

Trevor: I want to, yeah.

Jack Zoppa: we're all just are all four gonna like go in on like a

Trevor: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: storage unit somewhere, like liquid liquid cool a storage

JJ: Just a storage unit with a bunch of Mac studios in it.

Michael: Ha ha ha.

Trevor: well I so

Jack Zoppa: unit with eleven thousand dollar max. Like just to make the wall.

Trevor: Yeah, I mean I mean I set up

JJ: Mm-hmm.

Trevor: our own our own iMessage server at the office. So like

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: I feel like a lot of people could

Michael: Yeah.

Trevor: do that and it would actually be really useful. But

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: you need you need a Mac to run it on and it needs to always be on and connected to internet. So you could use the cheapest Mac ever. Like it wouldn't really matter what you use. We had a Mac at the office that I'm using, but I think iMessaging guests means a lot and it it actually matters. So

Jack Zoppa: So how are you doing that? I'm curious.

Michael: Yeah. How are you doing that through conduit or are you doing it outside of it?

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, I wanna I'm like I would this is something I'd love to like tinker with.

Trevor: I'm I'm currently doing it outside of it, but you could you could jimmy rig that and do it through conduit. You could figure out a way to do it, I'm sure.

Jack Zoppa: What's like the five step quick process?

JJ: I think Cole posted not too long ago like they have they do that for some customers. So yeah, he said it was really expensive.

Trevor: Well no, so you have to use Send Blue Yeah, you have to use Send Blue, which is like Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, but you gotta pay.

Trevor: Where like for me I had a Mac lean around that was already being used and I pay fifteen dollars a month for a phone line and it works. So

Michael: Is it cricket mobile is running all your guest messaging?

Trevor: No, it's X it's Xfinity. Yeah. If y we'll be

Jack Zoppa: So you literally just have like a phone number tied on to the IMAX like iMessage, and then you're somehow running everything

Trevor: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: through there.

Trevor: Yeah. So blue bubbles is what I'm using. It's open source. It's controlling the back end where you download on the Mac, you get make sure that iMessage and text message forwarding is set up. Phone calls also work, so I have phone calls coming through too from that. and then they come into our system and I it gives them typing bubbles, like it does everything. Yeah.

Michael: You how are you gonna get typing bubbles on a on

JJ: Yeah, that's a such a great experience.

Michael: an AI response that's

Jack Zoppa: Instinct does it. When you when you message instinct on iMessage it does it.

Michael: I guess when it's

Trevor: Yeah, it does the same thing.

Michael: I guess it maybe maybe it maybe it'll do the bubbles while it's thinking 'cause I mean the response is gonna be auto filled in half a second.

Trevor: Yeah, yeah, that's what it does. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah.

Trevor: Yeah. As it's thinking, it'll it'll start doing the bubbles and it can like messages and heart them and do things like that. Obviously you want to be careful with like overdoing that. Like I think instinct does a pretty good job of like how often it's liking things and and going and interacting with you, but it's just all configuring it and testing it and trial and error.

Jack Zoppa: Have you messed with instinct a ton or no?

Trevor: Not a ton. I need to like get it I need to dial in my like personal agent stuff because I have like so for for bugs, like I have linear tickets made and like sentry monitoring stuff. So whenever a bug is like noticed or created or the team like alerts about it, it'll linear ticket will automatically get created and then I have a Grokbot like team. So like there's an engineering watch grokbot that like monitors linear and then it'll like it basically just like has d several review processes with other GrocBots and then it uses claw code to fix the bugs and then close out the tickets.

So that's very business focused. I haven't used Grockbot very much for like personal use. I really like Muse and that's what I've like generally used. I don't like instinct because it doesn't have like a browser and and things

Jack Zoppa: Mm-hmm.

Trevor: like that, the same way. So but it's also cool because it's like your instinct can talk to other people's instincts and And you know, work through things and whatnot.

Jack Zoppa: Well, it doesn't have a browser, but I was so one of our owners had some issue. I I kinda forget. This is like s honestly it was really late at night and I was about to go to bed. And my instinct texted me was like, Hey, I found this in an email, like they're having this problem, it's like a revenue related thing. and we're on like we're switching from host way to guestie right now, but so we're still on host way and it was like, Do you want me to check their revenue? And I was like Yeah, this is instinct. I didn't

Trevor: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: I I also haven't set it up. And so it was like, Okay, I'll I'll go for it. Is it in Hostoway? I said yes. And then it came back and was like, All right, here's how much money they made last year. And I was like, I think I screenshot it and I sent it to Michael. I literally said, How did you find this? And it was like, I

Trevor: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: just I got into your hostway account. So it ha it does have a browser, but then I was like, I didn't give it to login. So I was like, How'd you log in? I was like, I just like

Trevor: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: two FA'd through your email. I was like, what? You just requested a c code, went and got it yourself,

JJ: That that's definitely creepy.

Trevor: Interesting.

Jack Zoppa: got into the account. I like it too. But Yeah, but it it has to have a browser because like

Trevor: I like that. I like that. I it it actually annoys the crap out of me. Yeah.

JJ: Yeah, I mean I appreciate the initiative. Yeah, I appreciate the initiative. But also like

Jack Zoppa: hostage is like a dinosaur of like a I mean no shade, but yeah, you like it kind of is like

Trevor: This this is not sponsored by us away.

Jack Zoppa: it is not. But

JJ: All right, well we're burning burning sponsorship bridges already, so

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But

Michael: man.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, it's like impossible for you to like build a connection to it. Like I'm sure you could build a your own CLI if you like really tried, but so it has to have like its own backend browser you just can't like tap to view access, you know. so I'm sure it's using its own VM somewhere, but I was pretty impressed. So I I need to maybe use it a little bit more and just mess with it, but I don't know. My Muse is is pretty sweet, I'm not gonna lie. I I've been like All in, max planned, unmuse, like it's just been

Trevor: Mm-hmm.

Jack Zoppa: cooking.

Trevor: Yeah. I like Muse a lot too. Yeah. But it's it my thing is like I'm always on my computer or like I have T three on my phone too. So like a lot of like little projects that I'm gonna have it use Cloud Code for. I guess to answer your question, JJ as well, is like a good way to monitor all those projects is like have a crock bot monitor them and make sure that like you're not leaving PRs open or not closed out and let you know when something was kind of like forgotten about or left behind. So yeah, that's one solution.

JJ: Yeah, it's a good idea. So, closing out this episode, let's go around what's one thing you're working on next week that you're stoked about. We're gonna hold you accountable for for next episode too.

Michael: Next week. I'll start on one I I started while I was on the pool deck on the top of this cruise. but we talked about like when Trevor built an MC or a CLI for guestie, I was like, okay, that's super cool. we built our own custom owner owners portal last year. and I don't know why I didn't think of this until it's probably when Jack texted me about he got the DoorDash MCP. Was wait, why wouldn't our owners want to be able to talk to their their own agent about how their property's doing. So I had it Grokbot spin up cursor and build out an MCP for our owners portal.

And so now our owners can just ask like, hey, how's how's our property doing year over year? the one I we just added that I need to make sure is dialed in right is they can now do owner's reservations through their own agent. So it connects to Muse or Grokbot or whatever. And they can like, hey, I want to stay during these dates. Is it open? Block it off for me. And then they get all the confirmation texts and emails. that's what I'm working on now, which I'm excited about because we kind of have all that tools as like the PM, but I forget like as a homeowner, they're still logging into some portal and stuck in the dark ages, like Jack throwing shade at hostaway.

Jack Zoppa: Well I'm curious how that's gonna affect your like owner relations inbound commun like volume of communication. Like I I wonder if there's a way to monitor MCP I mean sure you can monitor MCP calls. Like okay, how many people are using this and how does it alleviate like our team 'cause they can get quick answers.

JJ: Yeah, I'd be very curious too to see like adoption of of that, you know, what your

Michael: Yeah, we have post hog. Yeah.

JJ: owner persona looks like. For us I don't maybe like one one in ten owners maybe, but be curious.

Michael: I don't know. We'll see. We'll see as Muse and stuff like that continues to get more popular. And then yeah, we have post hog set up all over our owners portal so we know when people are logging in or what they're stuck on or what they spend time looking at. And so it'd be s we have a another thing where it just posts into Slack whenever owners do something on their portal. so it would be interesting to see, but just need to get that dialed in a little bit more. The other thing that was super huge that somehow Grockbot figured out for that.

feature was canceling their reservation too. Because we had to have it where owners would make a reservation and then not be able to like modify it or cancel it. And so that's that was kind of more of a point of friction for our owners relations team of shoot, I forgot to add one more day. Can you do that for me? So we'll see. Hopefully it works.

JJ: Nice. Jack, what do you got?

Jack Zoppa: I am building, I mean it's like half built, a property onboarding into like our OS for for Haven. well it's on state OS, but on the Haven side. So Right now we have historically used like click up to track like project management. We have like a 84-point list just because we have so many different counties here, like so many different requirements. and so I've been meaning to do this, but my general manager kind of like really wanted this. So basically I I rebuilt it there. And then the real real what I'm trying to do is have a great dashboard for like leadership, but also an MCP for our onboarding manager for this.

So I think the two big things are like if I can build a really good MCP that that the onboarding person can like interact with to like track their progress and get stuff done. And also there's a bunch of automation layer on the back of this, like triggering off like emails to the county or like you know, doing these specific things that could be huge and speed up our process of onboarding properties faster.

JJ: Love it. Trevor, what do you got?

Trevor: well I've been rebuilding some stuff in Rust randomly, so like

JJ: I've been seeing a ton of stuff online about Rust, but I know nothing about it.

Jack Zoppa: Just went over our heads immediately.

Trevor: Yeah, so yeah, this guy this guy basically like rewrote TypeScript seven in Rust, so it's like seven times faster. and it's funny because I had never looked at this, but I was using like s the not even TypeScript seven. So it was like taking probably like fifty X times longer to do type checks on our code and just like taking longer to get code done. So I got that set up on everything and then I was like I wonder what else I could do like that's currently being ran on other forms of code and the other languages that I could like rewrite in Rust and how that would like impact it.

So like last night I we had like a schedule maker that generates the schedule every day and it creates like the most optimized route based off of like an algorithm that I've built out and it used to take like a minute to generate the schedule and now it takes like point seven seconds to to generate the schedule. So not maybe not the biggest ROI, but I'm just trying to find like little improvements like that. And then I think I'm gonna get that T V thing cooking and like get as many of our units like beta testing it and see how that goes. And then I'm aside from that working on some like revenue management stuff, which is kinda cool.

JJ: Nice, nice. I am I got I got a couple of things. I said this last week. Next week I'm gonna get Astra set up on my Mac menu. So that's that's one thing I'm super excited about. And then also been working on a KPI dashboard so that everybody can load in their KPIs across across their like the brand's company and then across state as well. And so then we have one roll-up dashboard with everybody's KPIs across different departments. And so building out a system where it tracks all the meetings, all of the inputs from the different managers and that sort of stuff.

So hopefully next week I can talk about that. And then the last one, you know, everybody's talking about MCPs and CLIs and stuff. So still still improving on our state OS MCP too so that Basically any any employee can go in and ask any kind of questions and get the answers that they need off of the data. And I think that's gonna be even more important than like a guest EMCP because it's gonna have additional context and additional information layered on top of it. Sweet guys.

Jack Zoppa: Wait.

JJ: Well, great great catching up. We will be back again same time next week and maybe we'll actually gain a gain a listener or two. So

Trevor: Ha ha.

Jack Zoppa: Ha ha ha.

JJ: it's been real.

Trevor: Yeah. Alright fellas. See you later.