A New Look, Vibe Coding, and Prospecting with Deep Research
Leverage—March 17, 2025
Hey all! Happy Monday and welcome to Leverage!
When I started this newsletter I thought I’d focus on specifically how tech and AI was being applied in the architecture, engineering, and construction space. As things have evolved, however, I’ve started writing more about how technology tools and developments affect “knowledge workers” more generally.
The great opportunity right now is for people who make a living applying their intellect and creativity to leverage those capabilities using these new tools.
The goal is to scale your strengths and offload the rest.
So I decided to do a little rebranding to better align with this focus. Let me know what you think—and if you love it, share it!
Ok, on to the good stuff…
Tool I’m Using
I’m really excited about this one. For the last few days I’ve been using a slick app to help me stay focused on my most essential task each day.
I’ve tried every task management app under the sun and most excel at one thing: building a huge long list of things that once seemed important, but now seem like a burden. I spend hours managing the list instead of actually getting anything meaningful done.
Instead, I wanted an app that helped me focus. I wanted to start every day fresh and identify the ONE most important thing I needed to accomplish.
So I built a bespoke app to my exact specifications.
Using mostly Claude 3.7 Sonnet along with a couple of other AI tools I created a web app that does exactly what I want it to do and nothing more. It looks how I want it to look and has the features I want it to have.
I did all this in about an hour.
I have next to zero coding experience. I have never built an app before. This was all vibe coding.
You can check out the app for yourself here. Please let me know what you think!
Prospecting with Deep Research
Deep Research is a term used in a few different AI chatbot apps for an agentic (i.e. somewhat independent) process where the AI goes off and does research on your behalf, then returns with a report.
This week I’ve been using OpenAI’s Deep Research to help with prospecting for potential new clients.
For example, one of the types of work I do in my building envelope consulting business is to provide expert witness services to attorneys.
In the past I might have used Google or another search engine to identify attorneys that handle construction claims litigation in a given market. This would involve a search query followed by clicking through several websites to find appropriate contacts.
Now I simply describe the type of client I’m looking for to Deep Research (often using superwhisper to give a ton of context and nuance quickly and easily) and ask for a nicely-formatted table of results. A few minutes later the AI returns a list of names and contact information.
That’s it for this week! Talk soon.
-Matt