21 and Building With AI: Hudson Conkling on Work, Learning and Empathy

Hey, welcome back to another episode of AGI. I don't know what I want to call this schools out Saturday episode or humans in the loop. I think I, I think this is like a hybrid episode because what we have is a young man, Hudson Conkling, who I've met through AI and coffee and fishers, who's just started his career, who's killing it in AI and who embraced it while he was in school. And then I was doing something with it. So introduce yourself a little bit Hudson, then we'll get into some questions.

Yeah, okay. I'm Hudson. I just graduated from Anderson University this last spring, a year early as a double major, computer science and cybersecurity. I now work for Argenti AI. Shout out to Polo. They're at LaunchFishers where I met Jason. I do agentic engineering, so that's kind of not necessarily the correct term because I do a lot of things that aren't related to agents or engineering agents, but that's kind of who I am and what I do.

How old are you?

I'm 21. 21.

Did you grow up in Indiana?

I did.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Decatur, Indiana. It's just south of Fort Wayne. So I went to this small 1A, 2A high school. Played sports there. And there were actually a lot of Amish that went to my school. So technology for a little bit was, I mean, we still use it in classrooms, but it was almost like lenient to use it early on because Amish were still in school with me. So there's only so much technology you could use with them in the room.

So small town Hoosier kid with good morals. I know I was talking to you before we came on. I was like, I don't edit much unless you drop an F-bomb because YouTube doesn't like that. And I knew, like, you laughed because I knew you were not, I didn't have to tell you that. You weren't going to do that kind of thing. And yet you've got a job that is like a total, didn't exist when you started college, right? Like agentic AI was not even a thing. No. Yeah.

No, it wasn't really at all. Actually, AI, the first time I can remember hearing anything about like chat GPT or AI to begin with was like, halfway through my senior year, someone mentioned it about our English paper. They're like, hey, you should try to use this AI thing on your paper. I was like, yeah, right. Just hand wrote it like I normally would back in the day, like I still do. I thought professors are listening. I did write my own papers. I know I had a discussion with one. You think I didn't write it, but I can prove it if you ask me. I will show you the version history.

That is awesome. That reminds me of my first conversation with my now 16-year-old daughter. About a year ago, she came to me and was like, Don't tell mom this because I know she won't be happy about it. I do use Chad GPT. I don't cheat, I promise. And I was like, Mia, I'm going to tell you right now, the only two things you could tell me that you're doing with AI that would concern me is not using it because you will have to understand how to use it when you go out to get a job. I don't care what you're doing by the time she graduates. And the other is like having some kind of weird-ass relationship with it, like it's your boyfriend or you think it's a friend, in which case we probably need