Brody Harrison is a product designer and builder based in Seattle, Washington. After spending 15 years in the music industry — working with artists, running marketing, and producing music — he pivoted into designing and building software for early-stage startups and founders. He specialises in turning product ideas into functional web apps, combining UX, UI, and app logic to ship real MVPs. His current project, BidLine, is a budgeting and expense reconciliation tool built specifically for commercial film producers, a world he knows intimately through his producing partner.

In this conversation, he's coming off a hard stretch of building projects — nearly quit twice — and he's super honest about what it takes to keep going when your code base implodes.

We get into: why you should never let Claude make your architectural decisions (learned the hard way), outsourcing your agency to AI, building a tax reconciliation bot so your computer can do it while you sauna, new Figma tools that are much better than MCP, how Brody uses ChatGPT for creative and Claude for everything else, what STEM-based AI music production would look like, why design taste is the last defensible moat in a world where anyone can ship code, some on Middle Eastern tension and how AI helped him understand it, a half-baked marketplace for half-baked projects, and the question Brody leaves for the next guest about how much agency you're willing to hand over.

Guest Question for Next Episode
"What level of agency do you want to create with? Do you want to hand over the keys completely and press create, or are you wanting to be more interactive with the levels of architecture to build whatever it is you want to make? And how much agency do you want AI to have in your everyday life?" — Brody Harrison

Find Brody:

• Portfolio: https://brodyharrison.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brody-harrison/
• BidLine | Budgeting & expense reconciliation for film producers
  

Find Tay:

• NatureClub | Nature-based activity booking platform
• Land Library | Regional land knowledge wiki with "Chat with the Land" AI feature

Books Mentioned:

• Atomic Habits — James Clear (referenced in context of habit tracking)
  

People & Concepts Mentioned:

• Anthropic — Claude, Claude Code; discussed as most ethical AI company; pulled out of Pentagon deal
• OpenAI / ChatGPT — contrasted with Claude for creative vs. technical use cases
• Nvidia CEO (Jensen Huang) — keynote on MioClaw, agentic systems as the next Linux
• OpenClaw — open-source agentic framework
• Suno AI — AI music generation platform; Brody's current tool for production
• Pencil — design tool that creates .pen files for repos, alternative to Figma for AI-assisted design
• Figma — discussed MCP protocol and new copy-code feature for design-to-code workflows
• Lovable / Base 44 — vibe coding platforms where Brody started before moving to Claude Code
• Vercel — deployment platform
• Pinecone — vector database
• Jack — "forcing functions" concept: build a V0 to have something to push against
• British Petroleum / CIA 1953 Iran coup — declassified 2011
• Nepi (Nyepi) — Balinese Day of Silence
• Johnny Ive — mentioned re: OpenAI acquiring his company for a hardware device