Speaker 1: Media. Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue.
Speaker 1: I'm your host ed ze trn SO. In the last
Speaker 1: few weeks, there's been a dramatic sell off in software stocks,
Speaker 1: driven by the anxiety that companies will, instead of paying
Speaker 1: for someone like Salesforce or Microsoft, simply build their own software.
Speaker 1: It is a genuinely stupid assumption based on analysts and
Speaker 1: reporters that simply do not care about the truth. In
Speaker 1: their mind, one can simply type build me Salesforce now
Speaker 1: into claud code and have it barf out an identical
Speaker 1: functional clone that's compliance secure, stable, or because somebody was
Speaker 1: able to bunk it on the head enough times to
Speaker 1: spit out something that sort of looked like a tool
Speaker 1: like Trello maybe, or a personal website. Look, when you
Speaker 1: pay a software company, even a dogshit mediocre one, a
Speaker 1: monthly fee, you're not just paying them to access the software,
Speaker 1: but to take away the burden of maintenance that comes
Speaker 1: with running a software company. Minor things like currency changes
Speaker 1: or time zone shifting can cause major problems, and systems
Speaker 1: that aren't built with intention, you know, like something in LLM,
Speaker 1: would spit out and things get even more complicated when
Speaker 1: you start connecting other systems of record like billing or
Speaker 1: a customer's personal information, especially if they're in Europe. By
Speaker 1: the way, plan to have any of that information actually
Speaker 1: connect with a customers systems or you're gonna need a
Speaker 1: sock two order and you're definitely going to need to
Speaker 1: make sure it's got rock solid security so that nobody
Speaker 1: can swipe all of that data and then you get sued.
Speaker 1: I also assume you're going to effectively take an engineer
Speaker 1: off of one of your team's probably for good, to
Speaker 1: be honest, to maintain your new internal salesforce Monday Microsoft
Speaker 1: three sixty five and Notion clones you Trello cu clone
Speaker 1: as well. Probably you're a sana What I mean, how
Speaker 1: much software are you gonna build? Good? Thing? You've got
Speaker 1: clawed code to help speed that up, right, Just make
Speaker 1: sure you read everything it writes, because every little fuck
Speaker 1: up just became your problem, and you've got nobody to
Speaker 1: scream at, because while your company is saving fifteen dollars
Speaker 1: per seep per month, you've also fired the people whose
Speaker 1: job it is to make sure your nasty little software
Speaker 1: subscriptions actually fucking function. And while you may fear that
Speaker 1: a boss might try and force this down your throat
Speaker 1: to save money. I must be clear how impossible this
Speaker 1: task is. Even the most annoying, frustrating suffer as a
Speaker 1: service contract protects you from the grueling, underlying maintenance and
Speaker 1: infrastructural bullshit that goes into making sure the thing you're
Speaker 1: paying for actually loads and functions wherever you load in
Speaker 1: and even on the browser that you want to load
Speaker 1: it in. In most cases, thank you riverside. The people
Speaker 1: pushing this narrative are either fundamentally disconnected from how the
Speaker 1: world works or actively incentivized to mislead you. I've seen
Speaker 1: this narrative propagated on multiple different business television shows and
Speaker 1: supposedly respectable outlets, and it makes me genuinely worried that
Speaker 1: we don't have a media industry prepared to dissect fundamentally
Speaker 1: deceptive narratives. Just because it's possible for a non CODA
Speaker 1: to cobble together a website that looks near identical to
Speaker 1: a model's training data in the space of an hour
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that we're replacing every software company, nor is
Speaker 1: its ability to do so. Any indicator that will be
Speaker 1: able to do more than that in the future. I
Speaker 1: plead with the media, please stop filling in the gaps.
Speaker 1: Please stop seeing every incremental improvement as proof of whatever
Speaker 1: marketing slot Warrio Ama Day or Clammy Sam Altman is
Speaker 1: trying to cram down your throats. You're being played, You're
Speaker 1: being conned, and by extension, you're conning your listeners, your readers,
Speaker 1: and your viewers. And once the bubble pops, I believe
Speaker 1: they will demand an explanation from you. I certainly will,
Speaker 1: and really, in this era, I think people are under
Speaker 1: selling how big a reckoning there will be when the
Speaker 1: bubble collapses. How are we meant to trust anybody who
Speaker 1: vociferously pushed this or who got obsessed with AI once
Speaker 1: all of this falls apart. When I say falls apart,
Speaker 1: I mean that the current rates that you are paying
Speaker 1: are not even close to being sustainable. I'm currently working
Speaker 1: on a piece called the Hater's Guide to Anthropic on
Speaker 1: my premium newsletter, and I found a mathematical study that
Speaker 1: found that on a twenty dollars a month CLAWED subscription,
Speaker 1: you can spend over one hundred dollars of anthropics API tokens,
Speaker 1: and on the two hundred dollars a month about two
Speaker 1: three hundred to seven hundred dollars. You got to I
Speaker 1: guess it takes money to lose money. But this is
Speaker 1: the reality of the AI bubble. Everything you were using
Speaker 1: is being subsidized. It's being subsidized by these companies in
Speaker 1: the hopes that it kind of bakes into your life,
Speaker 1: except it's not good enough to do that. The frenzied
Speaker 1: media push under clawed Code existed to kind of beguile you,
Speaker 1: to make you think that there's more happening than a
Speaker 1: tool that might be able to kind of build a
Speaker 1: website sort of or build you some half functional software
Speaker 1: that maybe works sometimes, and when it comes to actually
Speaker 1: building that into something you could sell your shit out
Speaker 1: of luck. You actually do need to code. And even
Speaker 1: the things that you vibe code weren't really secure or functional.
Speaker 1: And even that mediocre web slop you're seeing spooched out
Speaker 1: by claud code is heavily subsidized. If people had to
Speaker 1: pay the real rates, those people you see jacking off
Speaker 1: on Twitter about claud code, they'd be paying two hundred
Speaker 1: plus dollars a day. Do you think they'd actually pay that?
Speaker 1: Do you think that's actually happening because I'm sick and
Speaker 1: fucking tired of hearing all the people rambling about claud
Speaker 1: code writing all the goddamn code. I'm sick and tired
Speaker 1: of it because I don't see what the end point is.
Speaker 1: I don't hear an actual result from this. I think
Speaker 1: people should be laid off. But if this was doing
Speaker 1: the thing that they were saying it would that al
Speaker 1: would be happening, and that would be definitively connected to AI,
Speaker 1: or more software would be being shipped. That's actually good.
Speaker 1: Just more software existing doesn't mean the software's functional or useful.
Speaker 1: And if you look at VIBE coded apps, they all
Speaker 1: kind of look the same. And that's the result of
Speaker 1: the more using the same training data. And it's why
Speaker 1: these things are not really good at building nuanced or
Speaker 1: unique software, because that's not what they do. They copy
Speaker 1: software that's already been written, and they do so with
Speaker 1: no intention, no real plan, and nothing you can look
Speaker 1: back on and say, oh, right, that's why they built
Speaker 1: it this way. And perhaps that's not a problem as
Speaker 1: you're a solo person building your own deadly little lap,
Speaker 1: but expand that to one thousand people or ten thousand
Speaker 1: people let's say five ten years passes, and let's take
Speaker 1: one of these what I think are bullshit statements about how, oh,
Speaker 1: ninety percent of our code's written by AI. Great, what
Speaker 1: happens in three years or four years when you go
Speaker 1: and look back and that, you go, shit, why did
Speaker 1: we do that? Are the person left or the person
Speaker 1: didn't leave. They've just been drinking heavily and they don't
Speaker 1: really remember what they were prompting the model with. And
Speaker 1: oh man, how do we actually see why they built
Speaker 1: this or what the reason was. This becomes a huge
Speaker 1: problem when things start breaking, when you have to make
Speaker 1: things more efficient, and then people will say, oh, we
Speaker 1: use AI to fix them. At some point, you're just
Speaker 1: looking at a kind of a rat's nest of crap
Speaker 1: of code written unintentionally spooched out meaningless. How do you
Speaker 1: fix that long term? How do you build an efficient
Speaker 1: software package out of that? How do you build software
Speaker 1: that continues to run well into the future. Is the
Speaker 1: idea that you just build AI on AI? God? No, anyway,
Speaker 1: I think once the real costs are charge, people are
Speaker 1: gonna drop this shit like a bad habit. I can't wait,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna be smug about it. I'm gonna be
Speaker 1: annoying about it, not gonna lie. But I think based
Speaker 1: on the YouTube comments, you're all gonna join me. Now.
Speaker 1: Next week we've got more Hater season, and I'll be
Speaker 1: back with one of these monologues. Maybe orerhaps I'll give
Speaker 1: you multiple interviews, done some weird ones. Got Victorious Song
Speaker 1: on wellness, Got Adam Becker on Epstein. I mean, got
Speaker 1: all sorts of shit coming. Looking forward to bringing you more,
Speaker 1: and I love you all