The Joe Reis Show The OGs of AI Analytics: Building Data Agents Before It Was Cool w/ Paul Blankley and Ryan Janssen
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Mar 10, 2026 Ryan Janssen, Zenlytic co-founder and product leader with LLM and VC experience, and Paul Blankley, Zenlytic co-founder and former data consultant focused on NLP, discuss building agent-driven analytics. They trace early Transformer work, the rise of agents managing code, model-driven architecture shifts, scaffolding strategies, and rapid vibe-coding of a CRM in real time.
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Fixed UI Bug From Phone With Claude And A Pull Request
- Joe describes asking Claude to fix a squished header by uploading an image and a GitHub repo, and it produced a PR.
- The agent made a follow-up mistake, Joe iterated, then merged the pull request on his phone.
Anchor Product Decisions On Enduring Customer Value
- Anchor your product to a unique customer value that survives model changes.
- Zenlytic kept 'enable trust' as its core by exposing model outputs as familiar SQL and BI artifacts.
Build With Scaffolding Then Remove It As Models Improve
- Scaffolding is temporary engineering added to constrain weak models; as models improve you remove scaffolding.
- Ryan frames product cycles as adding scaffolding, then removing it to achieve 'net negative scaffolding.'