# Leveraging GPT-6 Astra for Hardware and Business Automation

**Podcast:** The Startup Ideas Podcast
**Published:** 2026-09-10

## Transcript

GPT-6 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.
for people who want to make money to be more productive with AI and how you can use it specifically with Asha.
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 GPT-6 Astra and actually how you can have a more productive 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 OpenAI's most expensive model.
It's on par with Fable in terms of pricing.
But if you have a codec 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 to do two things.
Tell the agent, tell 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 suggest 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 Astra 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.
For anyone 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?
Do what you will 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.
Astra 4.
So let me share my screen real quick.
Please.
So this, I tweeted this.
Greg Brockman retweeted it.
And he said it was good.
So if it's good enough for Greg Brockman.
It's good enough for all of us.
So I just wrote, here's some 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'm paying 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.
So 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 workflow they sell to clients.
Break it into steps, tools, use inputs, outputs, human judgment points in 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 get your creative juices flowing 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, right?
Like, 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've realized is intelligence has gone up.
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 GPT-6 Astra is generate landing pages.
Literally.
It's just like you can use GPT-4 or whatever we have.
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 and 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.
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.
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 for a lot of people, 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 broke or slowed 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.
I'm so bullish on computer use.
And 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 Codex 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.
When I say QA, I don't necessarily mean there's like, of course, it could be like a bug, but it can also be like a UX bug.
People are just confused what happens here.
It's too much information.
The bugs are in the wrong place.
Exactly.
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 that.
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 ignores it completely and 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 it's just monthly.
Every month I want to know what I need to know, and that's it.
No, that makes sense.
And again, it's competition for a reason, right?
There's sort of this element of like, oh, looking around and stuff.
But obviously, innovation always wins.
And this one...
Yes, 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, like a really like something cute and fun that I'd want to share.
Cause to your point, right?
Like.
People are making these first-person shooters, which is great.
It shows the model capability.
But I have Call of Duty at home.
Exactly.
All right.
I showed you mine.
You show me yours.
Yes.
So please don't 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 take and 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 since 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 Apple, like they have like these beautiful products, but like their agent or the AI sucks.
In particular, I'm talking about the HomePod.
If anyone has the HomePod, Siri is terrible, but this is the best looking speaker.
in my opinion.
And I just got to thinking, like, what if I could put my agent on like a HomePod?
So first, my thought process is buy the HomePod and jailbreak 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 convo.
I asked, I told the agent, I have Blender installed, 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 HomePod-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 this is like $700, $600.
I was like, cool, give me Amazon.ca links, right?
And it got me the links.
And it was $561 before tax.
I was like, I just bought.
I just automatically bought.
But then I panicked.
I'm like, what do I 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 Pi.
This is me plugging it in.
This is some sort of speak.
This is the speaker.
This is some sort of connector.
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 thread, it was even telling me Chinese suppliers to reach out to, to build the HomePod shell.
So I went from idea to setup.
I bought all the products, right?
I told her 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, 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.
This, in my opinion, is the true power of Astra, where like we have models like Fable, like, OK, not Fable, but we have like 5.6 Soul 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, 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 didn't know you could do that.
So I said, low-key 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 Omarchi, 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 developer.
This is like a little above like my pay grade.
The last couple of months, I'm doing stuff like this.
I have a home lab.
I bought a couple of DGX ports.
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, 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, that would have required you become a full-time 3D designer.
or slash engineer 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 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 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.
Because I think that.
There's opportunity in terms of niche products that 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, 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 OpenAI...
has spearheaded with Astra around vibe manufacturing.
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, for me, where my brain is going is like, okay, what are some small little products that seem niche but solve a real pain point?
that I can go and create in a short amount of time and then create meta ads to drive traffic to those products.
That's what's going through my mind.
Yeah, and when I build my whole pod, 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 sweating for sure.
For the first time, I would like, if I, if someone asked me, pick a subscription, I would cancel my Anthropic subscription.
I would cancel Claude.
Astra's that good.
So please take advantage of the subsidies before they eventually start charging us 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, 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.
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 him out.
Thanks again for coming on.
I think this is probably your, what is it, sixth, seventh, eighth time coming on?
I'm a regular on this pod.
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 showing love as well.
See you later.
Have a good one.