QUESTION · SATURDAY Q&A

So many folks making apps with AI now for production. Anyone seen anything truly useful?

ASKED BY · Henry Ramos · YONKERS, NEW YORK · 26 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:26:51

THE PANEL'S ANSWER

Look for tools made by people with deep domain expertise and system knowledge, not generic vibe-coded apps. Trustworthy products have sustained developer support, not abandoned after initial release.

Craig McFarlane's Show Hub is a web app handling all back-end show statistics. John Wallace's Core Video lets you bring Zoom ISO feeds into OBS. Stadium Sound by Chris Sabato is another useful tool.

Greg

Empathy for users is critical when building apps. AI should not be used to skip planning and understanding user needs. Consider both human and AI interfaces for apps.

Tony MobleyPANELIST

Listed several people working on AI production tools: Chris Sabato, Ken Jordan, John Wallace, Rabbi David Pascan, Lord Zoom, John Drinkwater, Beta, and Tony Mobley. More tools are in development within the Office Hours community.

Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

From the transcript.

Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.

26:35Like, hey, I noticed you're trying to connect this interface. Would you like me to help you? No, I don't need that. Thank you. All right. Next up. Henry Ramos in Yonkers, New York comes up next. So many folks making apps with AI now for production. Anyone seen anything truly useful? Go ahead, Tony. So I made a quick list. Chris Sabato, Ken Jordan, John Wallace, Rabbi David Paskin, Lord Zoom, John Drinkwater, and Beta, I want to say Alpha tester, Tony Mobley, is working on something.

27:18So we'll see. But I would say stay tuned to office hours because there are always people in the community who are always working on things. And I would say that there are probably people that are doing things that they are just not sharing yet. And Courtney? Yeah. Look to our own office hours collection of people from right here on the panel. Craig McFarlane's Show Hub that he has done a little AI construction with.

27:57It's amazing. Every time I log into Show Hub, which we use here on the back end of office hours to sign up for things, and it keeps statistics and information about all the panelists and the people and the shows and everything that's been on, And all the stuff that used to be done, tracked on a manual basis in the past, is now handled by the Show Hub app that Craig has done.

28:23And he can talk a little more about it. Another app that one of our panelists and back-end people that operated in office hours has come up with is Core Video from John Wallace. He's made this as a couple of corevideo.io. and this allows you to bring Zoom participants into OBS as native sources. So you can look, you can see all of our smiling faces right there.

28:52So that's, go to corevideo.io. It's coming to OBS and there's a Mac version and a PC version in the works and a Zoom, I think a Zoom plugin as well. So there are a number, and as Tony mentioned, And, you know, there's four or five other people that are also cranking out things that are useful for sports, for signage, for, you know, doing graphics on shows, things like that.

29:17The list is almost endless. All right. Let's go to Bill. Which is, to me, part of the problem. If I know somebody and trust that they're a good thinker, and I think our panelist here, Craig McFarlane, and his work on the show stuff, the show hub, is a perfect example of that. Here's somebody who understands systems and signal flows and what needs to be done.

29:44He has the specialized knowledge of having been in the environment he's programming for and has seen what is necessary and what's fluff and can make great programming decisions to be really useful and really targeted. Now, for every Craig, I think there may be a thousand people out there now who thinks I have this great idea for a new fill in the blank, whatever it is, a new notepad that'll be exactly what I want in the world.

30:11will love that and they'll all want something. I'm making a commercial product. And in point of fact, no one's ever going to hear about it. Nobody's going to ever want to use it. But you're going to go to some app store at some point and there's going to be 150,000 Node apps because everybody's vibe coding their own. So I just want to find strategies as I get older to make sense

30:32out of what should I look for, whom should I look for it from. And the other thing I see is that it It seems like I see more and more stuff on the web from big companies that appear like it's vibe coded and it's not very good. And it seems to have some of the the the AI slop involved in it, even though it's from some huge conglomerate global operation.

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from Office Hours | Saturday | September 26, 2026.

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