The Startup Ideas Podcast - You're using GPT-6 Astra WRONG

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

I talk with Ras Mic about GPT-6 Astra. We skip the game demos and the 3D toys, and we focus on use cases to earn money or improve products. I share 9 Astra prompts that I posted publicly, and Greg Brockman reposted. Ras then shows his hardware project: he moved from a speaker idea to a parts list, a Blender layout, and merged code in about 30 minutes. The takeaway is simple: use this model for the ideas that felt too large for you last year. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 01:53 – Astra Overview 04:14 – 9 Astra Prompts 11:48 – Jarvis Speaker Idea 16:21 – Think Bigger with Astra 18:29 – Vibe Coding to Vibe Manufacturing 21:16 – Closing Thoughts Key Points Astra costs more per task, and it uses fewer steps, so the value per dollar stays high. A performance audit moved one of Ras’s apps from 800 ms to 20–30 ms. A security audit on his live payments app found real risks in production. Ras went from a speaker idea to a $561 parts order and a merged pull request in about 30 minutes. Ras’s point: intelligence keeps climbing, and bravery stays flat. Ask for bigger things. The shift that vibe coding brought to software now reaches physical products. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND MIC ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/Rasmic Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@rasmic

GPT6 Astra is here and I got good news for you. By the end of this episode, you're going to understand what are the different startup ideas? What are the different use cases? How do you use it to be more productive? How do you use it to save money, to make money, everything? All in here. I'm going to show you how you can use it with hardware to create hardware businesses. And this is an episode not just focused around cool 3D demos.

This is for people who want to make money to be more productive with AI and how you can use it specifically with Astros. What are the different prompts? How to think about it. I brought on my friend Ross Mike, who's just amazing at clearly explaining all this sorts of stuff. So enjoy the episode. Like, comment, and subscribe for more of this in your feed. And I can't wait to see you at the end.

Ross Mike on the pod. This isn't your average GP6 Astro review, is it? No, we don't have no games. We don't have any trade demos. We don't have. There's some weird ones, right? some weird 3D ones. Although those things are cool, they're not really useful to myself, you and Greg. So we're actually going to talk about some useful, cool stuff. And particularly,

we're going to get you guys to dream big with hardware. Yeah, exactly. So by the end of this episode, what I hope you take away is getting your creative juices flowing around really some ideas around how you can build a business using GPC6 Astra and actually how you, how you you can have a more productive, you know, code base, have better products. So by the end of this, you're not going to get some glitzy, cool video game thing, but you're actually going to have, okay, here's what I can actually create today. Yep, that's what we're going to do. And we'll just get started.

So a couple of things about the model, first and foremost, this is Open AI's most expensive model. It's on par with fable in terms of pricing. But if you have a codex subscription, very subsidized. And not only that, it's also very efficient, meaning it doesn't take as many steps to complete a task. So even though, yes, the price is high, you're still getting a good bang for intelligence. If you have an existing app or web app, mobile app, something that you've worked on software, I highly encourage you do two things. Tell the agent, tell that your codex agent, I want to run a performance update.

My pages aren't as fast as they need to be. My API calls aren't as fast as they need to be. Please review my entire app and suggest a performance. update. I did that for one of my apps and speeds went from 800 milliseconds to literally 20 to 30 milliseconds, right? That's an insane increase in speed. Highly suggests you do that. Number two, something we couldn't do with Fable is a security audit. I was telling Greg this, I have some sort of payments startup, if you will, in the background for a specific niche. And I had a couple of people using it. I ran the security audit and Astro was basically like my boy, you would have

been cooked if I didn't read all this. So run a security audit if you have an app that people are actually using. In terms of UI, I mean, I could just show some examples. This is one that it designed really nice. The reason it was nice was because I gave it a reference image. And the reference image, if I have it, is the old Microsoft XP network icon. I really like the OT network icon. Very swaggy. Very swaggy. For any more over 30, you remember this. I gave it that I'm like, use this as a reference image and yeah, it looks pretty nice. Without a reference image, it kind of does too much, right? So do that, do a tool with that.

Number four, computer use. The agent codex, Astra, insane with using your computer, insane with doing tasks for you in the background, using your local machine, highly encourage you to do that. But what Greg wanted me to talk about. Wait, before you get into this, before you get into this, I want to share some things of my own, of my own that I think you should use Astra for. So let me share my screen real quick. Please. So this, I tweeted this, Greg Brockman retweeted it. And he said it was, it was good. So it's good enough for Greg Brockman. It's good enough for all of us.

So I just wrote, here's some nine, nine cool, you know, Astro prompts we're trying. One is the bill renegotiator, go through my internet phone, software bills, jump into each provider's chat support, and negotiate them down or cancel what I'm not using. No brainer. I'll pay for a lot of stuff. I'll tell you that right now. And you're in Canada, right? So you can, you know, you're paying a lot probably for your phone and internet and stuff like that. I'm obsessed with like, how do you turn agencies into software right now? So here, pick one service business in a niche. You can pick the niche and reverse engineer the exact. The exact or foe they sell to clients break it into steps tools use inputs outputs human judgment points

and places where the work gets slow or expensive then design the simplest AI product that could replace the first version of that service and charge 500 to $5,000 a month now is it going to be perfect no but it's going to you know get your creative juices flowing around around what the software could look like and I want to add to that I think one thing that I do a lot that a lot of people should do is I prototype the heck out of everything, Greg. Let's say, like, I'm building an app and I'm using like Daytona, like their sandbox provider. I will literally, before I jump into Daytona, I'll spend 15 minutes trying to build a clone. It's not that I'm going to use the clone, but I'm going to allow building the clone to like just get me to think because I think one thing that I realize is intelligence has gone up, but the bravery for people to try new things hasn't gone up. Right. Like I said like I said this the other. in a video. The saddest thing that people can do with a model like GBT6 Astra is generate landing pages. Literally.

It's just like you can use GPT4 or whatever we had. Like we're past that. Like really think bigger. So I like that idea. Number two is fire. Number three, I almost called it the Gary Vaynerchuk prompt, but I refrained. Watch Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist in my city for cameras, furniture bikes, what have you, listed way under market.

text me the second one's mispriced with the link. This is like a really good idea for people who just want to make a few hundred dollars a day or something. Yeah. And, you know, are looking, you know, maybe they can't get a job. A lot of our young people can't get jobs right now. I'm going to screenshot that and put it in my church group check because it's true. Like jobs for the young kids is really, really hard right now. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really hard. So that's a good one. And also like for a lot of people, like it's fun to do this sort of thing. So young or old, this is an interesting one. Number four, if you are a founder, this is a no-brainer. Look at my docs. Basically, it's creating the one-person company dashboard. Look at my docs,

notes, stripe exports, analytics, customer calls, and project lists and build a weekly operator dashboard. I want to know what is making money, what's wasting time, what customers are asking for, what I should stop doing and the three highest leverage actions for the next week. Be blunt and show your work. Prove. You should set that up for your project. I was literally just going to say that. Okay, we got a few more, and then we'll get to your hardware thing using Blender, which I think is just fascinating.

I want you to show me that. Number five, audit my company for agent opportunities. Look at how this business works and find the tasks we should give to agents before hiring another person. This is just how, by the way, side note, this is how I'm thinking before I hire. anyone, I'm like, should I just get an agent to do this? Sometimes, yes, sometimes no. But that's been the default of how I've been thinking as I'm building my company. For each task, estimate the current human time, the cost of mistakes, the tools involved,

the difficulty of automating it. And the first safe version we could deploy, prioritize things that save money or create revenue within 30 days. And then we have, I'll do, we're almost done, I'll do them all. Be my browser operator. So you can actually use Astra to do this, right? Use the browser to complete this workflow. You give it the workflow.

As you go, click through the actual sites, collect the data, fill the forms where appropriate, and keep notes on what broker slow down. When you're done, give me the output, the repeatable SOP, and the automation plan so this can become an agent. And it will do this well. Like I'm so bullish on computer use.

Like I really like a lot of people might think it's like insane or it doesn't work or breaks. Like, you'll be surprised how good, like, Astra is. If anyone's in Canada, then you know how terrible the CRA website is, like how atrocious that monstrosity is. If the government's watching, I'm just joking. But I literally got Astra with Kodak to comb through tons of pages to find me the exact thing I want that I couldn't find on Google search, right?

So it really is that good. 100%. Number seven, you can. literally build a QA team. So every night, open my app on a real phone, go through sign up, check out in the main flows, and screenshot anything that's broken or confusing. So keyword confusing too.

Like when I say QA, I don't necessarily mean there's like, you know, of course it could be like a bug, but it can also be like a UX bug. Like people are just confused what happens here. It's too much information. It's too much place. Exactly. Yeah.

Competitor spy. sign up to my top three competitors, sit inside their product and their emails and send me a monthly report on every new feature, price change, and the thing they do better than I. That is a good one. That is a good one. Yeah. I mean, I think what's interesting is like there's two types of founders, either the founders who are obsessed with the competition and are like spending too much time looking at competition. And then the founder who like ignores it completely and like doesn't know what they're doing at all. And I think what's good about this is it's sort of like the happy medium. So you just, it's just monthly. Like every month I want to know like what I need to know and that's it.

No, that makes sense. And again, it's competition for a reason, right? Like there's sort of this element of like, oh, you know, looking around and stuff. But obviously, innovation always wins. And this one, yes, it is make a video, the last one is make a video game, but it's making a video game with the purpose of getting you email signups and phone numbers and data and helping you sell whatever you're selling. So it's build a browser game around this mechanic. You give it a mechanic. Don't just make a cute demo add progression, tension, scoring, failure, polish. And one reason someone would send it to a friend. That's extremely key because you're creating, you want to create something that's a viral game. I saw a lot of games that are like

really cool, but people wouldn't actually send them to their friends. Then add lead capture, like email and SMS, and it needs to tie into my core product, which sells XYZ. Yeah. Yeah. That's actually pretty good. Like a really like something cute and fun that I'd want to share. Because to your point, right, like people are making these first person shooters, which is great. It shows the model capability. But I have call the duty at home. Exactly. All right. I showed you mine. You show me yours. So please they'll make fun of me, people watching. But I've had this idea of a hardware startup for a while.

Obviously, we've seen the rise of personal agents. I have one in the works that I plan on launching soon that I think is a different taken pretty cool. But the one aspect that the reason why I wanted a personal agent and like this is again, like a dream of mine as a child, like the whole Jarvis thing is I wanted there to be physical hardware, right? And it's such a miss for companies like, you know, Amazon and like, like, Apple, like they have like these beautiful products, but like their agent or the AI sucks. In particular,

I'm talking about the home pod. If anyone has the home pod, Syria is terrible, but this is the best looking speaker in my opinion. And I just got to think, I'm like, what if I could put my agent on like a home pot? So first my thought process was buy the home pot and jail break it. I did a little bit of research, not possible to do it. I'm like, what if I built it? Right. So I literally told the agent and I'll zoom in so we can see the convoy. I told the agent, I have blender install. Can you use it? I know that it can use it. I just wanted it to set up a connection. It did that. And I asked it to create a home pod like speaker. And it did. And I asked him, I want to build an AI home speaker. I want to load my agent Ruth from, and I gave it my repo. How would I DIY? And then it basically said

that I would need a Raspberry Pi speaker. I could load in my agent and it was possible. Now this got me excited because I didn't think this was possible. I didn't think that I had the capability to do it. And it basically created me a diagram and it said, it even went as far as to say, this is what I would need to buy to have a first physical prototype. Now, I got excited, right? And it even gave me a budget. It's like 350 to 450 before tax. I live in Canada. So it's like 700 bucks, 600 bucks. I was like, cool, give me Amazon.ca links, right? And it got me the links. And it was 560. one before tax. I was like, I just bought. I just automatically bought, but then I panicked. I'm like, what do I don't know nothing about hardware. So I asked the agent, Greg, can you use Blender to show me

the setup of this project? And will you believe it? It showed exactly how I would have each thing laid up, right? This is the raspberry pie. This is me plugging it in. This is some sort of speak. This is the speaker. This is some sort of connected thing. I don't even know what this is, but this helps. And I think this is the voice recognizer. But it basically laid out on Blender how I would have this set up. Now I've got to the point where I'm like, oh, I can build this. And then it was telling me once we've proven the proof of concept, then this is what we would need to build out the HomePod version.

And then even in a separate thread, I have emails there so I don't want to share. But in a separate third, it was even telling me Chinese suppliers to access, to reach out to to build the HomePod shell. So I went from idea to set up. I bought all the products, right? I told it I bought all the products. And then I was like, okay, like I bought this stuff, but I have my agent repo. What code would I need to add or what changes would I need to make to set this up?

Guess what it did, Greg? It wrote the code and it made a PR. I literally had code. It made a PR where like once I have the thing set up, I can easily load my agent. Mind you, this is a couple of minutes conversation, but I dared to think a little more bigger out of my box. So it gave me the PR. It explained to me the code. And then I asked it for the links again because I didn't purchase at that time.

I asked for the PR. I can click it and I can show you. I merged the PR. It made a PR. So I know, like, once I have all the hardware stuff ready, I'm going to build it and I'm going to have it set up. And I even asked it just to be should I get one of each of one one of each by the way. And it said yes. So we went from idea, from exploration, Greg, to set up to initial prototype.

Cost you 500 bucks. It gave me, it showed me exactly how it set everything up, right? And if I have further questions, I'll continue to work with the agent. It also wrote the code that I'm going to load into the Raspberry Pi to make my speaker agent work. this was half an hour of work. This, in my opinion, is the true power of Astro where, like, we have models like Fable, like, okay, not Favit, we have like 5.6 Seoul and all these different smaller models that are good at a lot of things.

What makes Astra amazing is for these like insane hardware projects, this next level software. So again, if you're using Astra to build a landing page, it's a sad, use of intelligence, but I kind of wanted to use this moment to encourage you all if you've had that hardware idea, if you've had that next level software idea, if you want another, I don't know if I have the tab here, I have a PS4 lying around. And I was wondering, if I, can I boot Linux on a PS4 and run agents on it? And I literally said, I have PS4 based on what you know about me. I don't plan on gaming with it. What can I do? That was the first thing I asked. And it's like, you could turn it to a media server, this, this, that. But then it said,

turn it into a Linux learning project. I was like, oh, I don't know you could do that. So I said, loki, nuking it and running Linux would be cool. And then it says, yeah, a PS4 you can SSH into and use as a Linux lab would be a fun project. And then people have been talking about on Marchy, which is a type of Linux distro. And I was like, could I run it on PS4? Yes. I could run Linux on my dust collecting PS4.

I would have never imagined, thought, or even tried to do this. But with this model, I'm starting to think way outside the box. And mind you, you might think, oh, you're a developer, so this is easier. This is networking OS stuff. I'm more of a web dev, mobile dev type of development. This is like a little above like my pay grade. But like the last couple of months, I'm doing stuff like this. I have a home lab.

I'm buying. I bought a couple of. DJX-14. I am thinking way above what my normal means would have been if I didn't have access to this intelligence. And there's no reason you shouldn't. I'll stop yapping, Greg, so you can say some things as well. I remember when, to 2024, when Lovable and Bolt and Replit at V0 came out, all of a sudden, anyone could be a vibe coder. And we started seeing all these vibe coding projects, websites, landing pages, apps, and the effects of that are still playing out to this day. It feels like we're having a similar shift right now, but for physical projects.

So what you showed me with your hardware product, you know, that would have required you become a full-time 3D designer or slash engineer. I would never know how to do any of this. And to be honest, I wouldn't have tried because it's intimidating and like I think you know most humans like I myself like I like knowing the stuff that I'm doing and if I don't know like about Harbor for example it would feel intimidating for me for me to even try now like I have a like a friend for 200 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month or 20 bucks a month that can actually walk me through all of this and it's super possible I even have a desk coming up that's going to be like right here and it's going to be my hardware station and I'm going to just start building

random stuff and let's say nothing turns to a product the enjoyment of learning and developing and maybe it leads to a job opportunity a business whatever it is you owe it to yourself to do this stuff yeah i mean make a printable object a cad file a blender model a circuit board like something um because i think that uh there's just there's opportunity in terms of like niche products that you, you know, you might be like, oh, I don't know how big of a market there is for this sort of thing, but it doesn't need to be huge. And if it doesn't cost a lot to create, like there's a business here. So I think I actually personally believe that there's going to be thousands of $1 million a year plus businesses that get created and this whole shift

that Open AI has spearheaded with Astra around like vibe manufacturing. You know, Will the other models catch up? Absolutely. But I think that it's fair to say that Astra was the first model that ushered in this era. And I think this is just really, like for me, where my brain is going is like, okay, what are some small little products that, you know, seem niche, but solve a real pain point that I can go and create in a short amount of time and then, you know, create, you know, meta ads to drive traffic to those products? That's what's going through my mind. Yeah, and when I build my whole pot, I'm going to hit up Greg to teach me all that stuff. So make sure you're subscribed because that's all the stuff he teaches here, too.

I appreciate you. Mickey, thanks for coming on. Astra is awesome. And I'm curious to see how the other models take note of it. Sure. Anthropic is sweat for sure. For the first time, I would like, if I, if someone asked me pick a subscription, I would cancel. enthropics description, I would cancel clot.

Astra's that good. So please take advantage of the subsidies before they eventually start charging as the real price of these things. Yeah, because the value, I mean, think about it. Like, the value is obviously

more than what we're paying now. Yep, yep. Like I asked my Astra agent to calculate how much of, how much I've been using, like the subscription price, but also like in terms of API price, how much like I've been using

in terms of model costs. And in the last week, I've spent over $24,000. Mind you, I just have a couple of $200 subscriptions, right? So there's an insane level of subsidization that's happening. Take advantage of it now. Dream big, act big and build big. I appreciate you. I'll include links where you can follow. Ross Mike, as he's known on the internet, YouTube, X and all those places. Go and subscribe. Go and check them out. again for coming on. I think this is probably your, what is it, six, seventh, eighth time coming on. I'm a regular on this part. And as always, I appreciate you, Greg. It really means a lot for you bringing me on. And thank you everybody for always watching and chill in love as well. See you later. Have a good one.