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