Slackers

Calling All Builders: Real AI Use with Keegen Knapp

Episode Summary

The tools are only as powerful as the curiosity behind them. Keegen Knapp is a senior strategist and product builder who has been deep in AI tooling as a practitioner. In this episode, Jaime and Jonathan pull him into a wide-open conversation about what AI actually looks like when someone who builds things for a living sits down with these tools every day. From competitive intelligence agents to synthesized executive teams to personal operating systems, this is the tactical episode the show has been building toward.

Episode Notes

Everyone has dabbled.  But what does it actually look like when someone who builds things for a living sits down with AI tools every day and puts them to real work? Not the worldview conversation. Not the hype. The actual workflow. The shortcuts. The moment you go, "Oh my god. That completely changed how I work."

In this episode of Slackers, Jaime Solis and Jonathan Sasse bring in Keegen Knapp — senior strategist, product builder, and hands-on AI practitioner — for the show’s most tactical conversation to date. Keegen has been building AI products with AI, running multi-agent loops, and rethinking what a working knowledge base looks like at the project level. This one is for the builders.

Key themes include:

• Why Cursor is more than a code editor — and how non-developers can use it for strategy work
• How to build a working knowledge base using local folders, Markdown files, and context control
• The competitive intelligence workflow: building an agent that scrapes, synthesizes, and stores daily
• Synthesized executive teams and product advisory councils as AI personas that actively shape your build
• The Ralph Loops framework: how to run autonomous refinement cycles with human checkpoints
• Why GitHub is becoming the new LinkedIn — and what that means for how we signal our value
• The difference between curiosity-driven use and shortcut-seeking — and why it matters
• What a personal AI operating system looks like and why it’s closer than most people think
• The “spoons” framework: how creation and discovery give energy rather than drain it

Keegen walks through a concrete example — a cycling apparel startup — to show exactly how a small team would set up a shared repository, build a competitive intelligence agent, and start generating research in the background without ongoing manual effort. The workflow is more accessible than it sounds. The real barrier, as the conversation keeps returning to, is not technical fluency. It’s the willingness to be curious and to actually start.

Jonathan frames the transition clearly: most people have been using AI as a super-powered search engine. The leap — to project-based context management, to building agents, to assembling virtual teams of expertise you don’t personally have — is closer than it looks. And for creatives especially, these tools don’t threaten the work. They finally give ideas somewhere to go.

You don’t learn to ride a bike by reading about it. Pick a pet project. Try it one way. Abandon it. Try it a different way. The output will be completely different — and so will you.

More from Keegen online:

• GitHub
• LinkedIn
• Grindwell.ai (golf training w/AI project)
• Ralph Loops (learn about this new software engineer mindset)