Vibe Coding is BS w/ Charlie Meyer

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Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to Better Offline.

Speaker 9 I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

Speaker 9 And we're here in the beautiful iHeartRadio studios in New York City, and I've got a guest, of course, Charlie Meyer, the esteemed blogger and CEO of Pico. Charlie, thank you for joining me.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me.

Speaker 9 So, yeah, you've gained some, I would say, notoriety recently by making blogs that go against the oinking of the hogs of the valley.

Speaker 9 And I think your scaling loss piece was the one that really got me going.

Speaker 9 Yeah, so

Speaker 9 my blog gets some love and mostly hate on Hacker News. That's my distribution channel.

Speaker 9 and so i'm trying to get off of that we're going to try and build it like a newsletter type thing but yeah i'll post on hacker news and every once in a while i'll get something that blows up and i'll get my uh get my haters in there so so what is it that's pissing them off uh so like i had a post a few weeks back that was on i called it llms or the ultimate demoware right and so i define demoware as software that you make the software and it works well in the 30 minutes that you're showing it off to executives or whoever's going to buy it right and then it doesn't do the thing right right it doesn't do the thing day to day.

Speaker 9 And so I listed some examples. And my startup's in EdTech, right?

Speaker 9 So we do, you know, and so like there's always something that I pick on is I really hate AI tutors and we can get into that and how that all works.

Speaker 9 But so I said, oh, I listed out a few things that I thought were demo worse. So it's like, oh, vibe coding that makes dashboards.
It's an easy thing to pick on. And then I said, you know, AI tutors.

Speaker 9 And I said, well, maybe the kid won't want to talk to an AI tutor. Yeah.
That was the critique I made. Right.
It's like, maybe they just don't want to talk to him.

Speaker 9 Yeah, won't want to talk to a a person.

Speaker 9 Maybe they want to have like a teacher who is like in the classroom. Crazy idea.
Maybe. Yeah.
But did people not like that? Well, yeah. So some people, you know,

Speaker 9 we can name names if we need to, but I actually don't know how to pronounce them. So

Speaker 9 but anyway, so people are in there and they're like, you have no idea. Like if you think that AI can't tutor calculus, like you have never even tried.
And it's like, it's a classic, like

Speaker 9 you're missing out. Like you somehow are completely missing the point.
And you know, something's really good and innovative when the only defense of it is you're a moron. You, you ape.

Speaker 9 You have never tried it. And it's like, well, what if I like have? Like, what if this is like actually the thing I spend my time on is thinking about this? Because

Speaker 9 you're a non non-AI IDE, right? So a coding environment. Yeah, yeah.
Well, and that, yeah, we got, yeah, lots of that, lots of that. But like, so the software that I make,

Speaker 9 bouncing around a little bit here, but Replit was a, is a company. And so Replit was a very loved by teachers IDE online.

Speaker 9 And their whole thing was like, we teach, like, we help you teach coding online because it's a way for you to run Python and Java and all your code online. And you can do it.

Speaker 9 And you can do it on Chromebooks and you can collaborate. And they had like teacher tools and they sold the software to schools.
I was a teacher for a couple of years.

Speaker 9 That's kind of like my background as an engineer and then a teacher. And I used Replit and it's awesome.

Speaker 2 And this was before, was this before they used AI?

Speaker 9 This is before they used AI.

Speaker 9 So Replit, just for the listeners right now, Replit is an AI-powered coding environment that claims to be able to vibe code software, but doesn't really. But what did it used to be?

Speaker 9 So it used to be an excellent tool. Just an absolutely fantastic tool.

Speaker 2 It was just, you go on, you log on, like Google Docs for coding. Right.
So like you think, okay, well, back in the day, you'd have to download Microsoft Word and whatever, and that sucks.

Speaker 2 And it's great to bring that online into the cloud. And they did that.
And they were like very innovative. They were kind of like first to market of having like a very fully featured online IDE.

Speaker 2 And that is useful for exactly one thing. And that is useful for teaching in schools.
Right. Because like you have kids and they have $200 Chromebooks that the school bought them.

Speaker 2 And so you get Replit and like, boom, I have a great way to teach computer science now. That is fantastic.
And that's what it used to be before

Speaker 2 AI. Yeah.
And now it's just. And now it's, yeah.
It's so listeners.

Speaker 9 You've probably heard me mention Replit in the past. It's one of my least favorite, most favorite companies.
If you go on the Replit Reddit, it's just the the wallet inspector.

Speaker 2 And so now that's kind of like,

Speaker 2 I've gotten rid of most of my like Doom scrolling places, but like, this is not, I don't know what type of scrolling it is, but like, I go on our Replit.

Speaker 9 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 And it's just so funny.

Speaker 9 It's just guy being like, yeah, spend $1,500. It doesn't really work.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 But I think if I spend $5,000 more dollars, it might. Well, I mean, people are like, okay, well, should I spend $5,000? I mean,

Speaker 9 we can be reasonable, Ed. We We can bring the numbers down to reality.

Speaker 9 I spent $50, which for a person who has got a bad software idea,

Speaker 9 that's a big waste of money. And they're like, okay, well, it seems like I might need to spend $250 more, or should I go on Fiverr? Yeah.
And then it's just people in Reddit. I mean, it's Reddit.

Speaker 9 So they're just like skill issue.

Speaker 9 Well, that and also the people who are like, I, too, am running into this problem. And then a lot of that.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 Where it's like, and, but Replit, just for, for anyone on there, on, on Replit right now, like, what do they they do to teachers?

Speaker 9 So teachers, they had a product for teachers that worked, that was great, that was well offered.

Speaker 9 And on

Speaker 2 November somethingth, 2023, this is a big day for my business because this is the only reason I have my business is to replace Replit.

Speaker 2 Because they turned on AI Autocomplete for kids. No way to shut it off.
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of learning? Yeah. So

Speaker 2 I have a small YouTube channel with not a million subscribers, but I talked to teachers on there.

Speaker 2 And we had a customer of mine on there and they were like, yeah, you know, that year, it just seemed like the guy, I don't know, he just like, he missed the fact that the AI got turned on.

Speaker 2 No one sent him an announcement or an email or a warning.

Speaker 9 So all of his students were just amazing.

Speaker 2 They were just, he was like, yeah, everybody, everybody, everybody got an A that semester. Like, I wonder, you know.

Speaker 9 Did that actually, so did students actually end up getting great scores because no one noticed the AI going on?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it took, depending on who you, if you're wandering around the classroom looking at students and you see them all tab completing. Like, because AI is a very good thing.

Speaker 9 And just for, just for the listeners as well, because I've got to spell it out. So with these AI platforms, you hit tab complete because it's basically like autocorrect coding.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And so

Speaker 2 like AI, for what it's worth, you know, we can be really balanced podcasts. Sure.

Speaker 2 But AI can really well, it can solve intro to computer science for ninth grader problems with the incredible accuracy.

Speaker 9 Well, that's Carl Brown from the Internet Bugs. He said it makes the easy things easier and the harder things harder.

Speaker 2 Yes. And so, yeah.
So if you need to, if you're in ninth grade and you're writing your first program, yeah, you can, you can tab complete the whole thing in one go. It'll one-shot it, Ed.

Speaker 2 That's incredible. It'll one-shot

Speaker 9 your ninth grade program. It's this term, that, that term, just for listeners, is like, it means that you just give it a problem and it solves it correctly.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So it's like count to 10.
And the AI can count to 10. Wow.
Which is incredible. That's revolutionary.

Speaker 9 But fun fact, if you try and make ChatGPT count to a million, it freaks out. If you do the voice mode, Adam Connover told me this one.

Speaker 9 If you go like count to a million, it stops around nine or ten and then says, Should I continue? And it just won't do it. It's very funny.
I love living in the future.

Speaker 9 Yeah, so they, though, they turned on the AI and then they were like, We're not doing education. And companies have deprecated things.
Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 9 yeah, they're usually not their main product. Yeah, yeah, whatever.
So they, I mean,

Speaker 9 I'll tell you, you know, I'm an indie developer or whatever, like software does not make a ton of money because there isn't that much money selling an online IDE to schools.

Speaker 9 There's money, but it's not a, it's not a billion-dollar business. It's fine.

Speaker 9 Neither is Replit.

Speaker 9 Yeah, but so.

Speaker 9 You can't raise on billions of valuation. No, no, saying, hey, kids have Chromebooks and we're going to charge $10 a student or whatever.

Speaker 9 Of course, you're not going to raise a bill.

Speaker 9 That's not a billion-dollar business. No.
But the AI thing seems magical. And then the vibe coding thing happened.

Speaker 9 And as soon as the vibe coding stuff started happening, they were like, we're all in on this. And they deleted, they deleted everything.

Speaker 9 So, not just deprecated, right? So, it's one thing to deprecate software. So, it's like, and deprecate is when you stop supporting it.

Speaker 9 So, you say it's it's no longer supported, and you put up a big red, scary banner on the top saying, your work is read-only, you cannot create anymore. Right.
That is a really mean thing.

Speaker 9 But it happens, software changes, you know, repl it for what it's worth to be nice and fair to them. Like, they have investors, and you know, they're under the gun to provide some returns.

Speaker 9 And so, whatever, the teacher thing isn't going to make them a ton of money, but they deleted the stuff.

Speaker 2 Which is why, and when you say the stuff, was this like projects that schools had been working on?

Speaker 9 It was so a teacher says, I'm going to spend two, three years putting in all my curriculum, all these markdown files, all this stuff, all these tests. I'm going to configure all this stuff.

Speaker 9 No, deleted, gone. Monsters.
Deleted. Actual monsters.
And now,

Speaker 9 but they sent the warning email, Ed. Wow.
In July, when are teachers online looking at their work email in July? Yeah,

Speaker 9 classic big month for teachers. It's the beach month.
Well, for American teachers, yeah, it's not a huge month. So, yeah, in July, we say we're going to delete all your stuff, and then it's gone.

Speaker 9 And was there any way to back it up? Well, there was until they deleted it all. That's so cool.
It's awesome.

Speaker 9 So they're an awesome, like, if you're a Replit developer, you know, when the next big thing comes up and Replit may decide to delete all your stuff. Well, Replit, they launched Agent 3.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 9 That was my favorite launcher product I've ever seen because I've mentioned this on the show before, but it's like, oh, it's an autonomous coding thing. And it's just the digital Mr.
Bean.

Speaker 9 It's just like, why don't you go off and build me a software thing? And it just fucking spends $100 and goes,

Speaker 9 I don't know, you like this? I don't fucking care. And then they had to release a thing where you could make it think less.
They had to add tweaks to it because it was so bad. It's ins.

Speaker 9 I actually feel like, and I'm not putting words in your mouth here, I feel like vibe coding may be just fraud. I think it's a fraud.

Speaker 9 I don't, it should not be legal to lie like, because it is a fucking lie. So, so I will, I'll defend the vibe coder platforms out here.

Speaker 9 So the defense no, I mean it's so it is it's fraudulent, right? I mean like if you say hey, you don't know how to code at all and

Speaker 9 yeah, just sign on to this website. And I mean look at their marketing page.

Speaker 9 That's exactly what I'm loading. Apart from loading it, it's with it with a nice blue iPhone Air.
Oh yeah, beautiful blue. I have the I have the space black.
Hell yeah. The iPhone app rise up.

Speaker 9 It's a great phone. It's a great phone.
I'm not Apple made me pay for it. Yeah, turn your ideas into apps.
What will you create? The possibilities are endless.

Speaker 9 And then it's a fake prompt that says, make me a business tool for marketing teams that helps generate professional business proposals. And then add automated backup and recovery.

Speaker 9 I think if you asked Replit to do that, it would cost $300 and nothing would happen. I think it would just punk out

Speaker 9 barely functional code. So I wrote a post on this and

Speaker 9 I was excited to end the post saying there has never been a successful thing ever. Unfortunately, Replit has added a set of case studies.
And I think that they use it.

Speaker 2 And so the case studies are we sold to enterprises and we're going to do prototypes of internal dev tools.

Speaker 9 Or not dev, not dev tools, internal like, you know, management software for inside your back office software.

Speaker 2 So they haven't had a case study since what looks like August.

Speaker 2 And one of them is how Zinus saves $140,000 with Replit,

Speaker 2 but it also cuts development time by 50%.

Speaker 2 But so then the question is, did the person typing stuff into Replit, did they know how to code? Exactly. See, that's my...
Because if they know how to code, whatever.

Speaker 2 It's not Vibe coding. It's just, you could have used cursor, you could have used Windsor, you could have used any VS Code or what is it?

Speaker 9 What's the free one Amazon's doing now? Kiro, maybe. Kiro.
And then there's the, I like the one that came out from China and everyone's like, that's going to send information to the Chinese.

Speaker 9 It's like,

Speaker 9 will it? Yeah, I don't know. But I don't think they're going to, your clone of Flappy Bird is going to be taken up by a

Speaker 9 situation period. The way that the word vibe coding has the meaning that it has today, I believe, is you do not know how to code.
You type prompt and you get app out.

Speaker 9 And I'm not going to dox this person because they were nice to me once.

Speaker 9 But like, there's a person online. Like they just do like, oh, here's 100 days of AI.
And I'm going to make a fully functional software as a service company fully, and I don't know how to code.

Speaker 9 And then you look at this person and they're typing in the prompts and it's like, they clearly have like a pretty strong technical background. And then the thing still doesn't work, by the way.

Speaker 9 That's like cool. Like they know how things work and it's still broken.
Yeah. So I mean, whatever.
This person was like a product manager or something.

Speaker 9 So like they, they, they know what an API is and they know what a web server is and they know the names of the different technologies. And like that's going to get them.
part of the way there.

Speaker 9 But the idea that you can end-to-end create a software product that has some value is crazy. We would have heard about it.

Speaker 9 No, that's kind of, and your demo wear post was really good about this because it was kind of like, look, you can do the proof of concept, you can do this, but we've never seen the next stage.

Speaker 9 And someone else did a really good one. It was like shovelware.
They said, where's the shovelware? Where's the crap software?

Speaker 9 Where's the, I remember the first times I was on the internet, the amount of weird shareware shit there was, just like different forms of IRC clients and shit. There were people making weird software.

Speaker 9 Why isn't that happening?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, so you'll see, okay, I made Flappy Bird. I made a weird thing.
I made like,

Speaker 2 you can make little

Speaker 2 small pieces of software for yourself that maybe have a little bit of value. It is fun.
It is a novelty.

Speaker 9 Yes.

Speaker 2 If you know, like, but then it doesn't work. Like, it's, so I, I do not know, I'm a web developer.
Yeah. So I know how to do web apps.

Speaker 9 I can't code for shit. So whatever.
But like, it's that, that's what I know. That's, that's what I've been doing.
I've been coding for whatever, and I know how to do that.

Speaker 9 I do not know how to make iPhone apps. Yeah.
So I was like, okay, you know what I'm going to do? They just announced Claude, whatever, because I'm interested in this stuff. I'm an early adopter.

Speaker 9 I don't And also, if it did what it,

Speaker 9 however I may feel about AI, if it actually did what, if vibe coding was real, that would actually be a huge deal. That would be a huge fucking deal.

Speaker 9 I wouldn't, I would have all my ethical concerns, but if I could actually build software without knowing anything, wow, that would be great. Never been the case.
But you tried, though.

Speaker 9 Well, so I tried. So my idea was like, okay, I use my phone too much.
I'm going to make an app called App Snooze. It takes, so you say, I want Gmail.
I want it snooze for a half hour. Got it.

Speaker 9 So that when I open up the Gmail app, it uses this screen time thing and it says blocked.

Speaker 2 And then 30 minutes is up. I get it back.
Right. That is impossible to make using iOS, essentially, without like a substantial amount of work.

Speaker 2 It's, it's based on like the limitations of how Apple does their stuff with screen time. It just cannot be done.
So I type this stuff in. Claude is like sitting there.

Speaker 2 It's like, oh, yeah, you're, you're awesome. You are killing me, dude.
This is a great idea. You got this.
You got this. Yeah.
Which it actually does say.

Speaker 9 And one of their, I've been watching like the World Series series or whatever and a lot of nfl and like the chat gpt ads we can hopefully talk about that those are i haven't caught any of those yeah okay well oh no no i love to hear about this because uh i'm a raiders fan yeah and um i try not to watch if i needed to watch a poorly conceived product i could just use my season tickets but i sold them a so wait but Keep going though.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, so but so it's like you got this, but then it's this is the

Speaker 2 whatever. So they have haiku and they have sonnet and they have opus.
Yeah. So whatever.
Awesome names. But so they have sonnet, which is the really good one.
You know,

Speaker 9 it's very well respected.

Speaker 2 It's supposed to be, it's supposed to be cloud's supposed to be the good one for coding. And so I was like, I'm going to pay, I'm going to pay $20.
I'm just going to see what happens.

Speaker 2 If I can get this thing on the app store, that'll be great. I'm going to charge 99 cents.
Let's see if I make 100 bucks. Sure.
See if I make my Apple developer account back. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But dump the hundred bucks into the Apple developer account. Awesome on Apple, by the way.
You can't actually do half the app coding that you need to without paying 100 bucks. So good.

Speaker 9 That's a business.

Speaker 9 That's Apple bay.

Speaker 2 But anyways, so I do that. I want to make my hundred bucks back, but it cannot be done.

Speaker 9 Well, the app, you couldn't build the app, though, it sounds.

Speaker 2 Well, but because of like literal limitations in how iOS works in terms of like, you can't have a timer that goes off and messes with screen time. That's just not a thing that Apple.

Speaker 2 I thought there was this thing called Brick, where there's a physical device as well, but that feels like a Bluetooth. Something's going on with Brick.
I don't know.

Speaker 9 But here's the thing as well with all of this.

Speaker 9 You just made me think, it is weird that the app doesn't just go yeah i can't build that mate it would be nice if it did say that and it was this was weird i had never observed this behavior before and again i i i've posted online like okay you know this you know three beasts in blueberry that thing the oh yeah yeah yeah yeah whatever and and people i i posted that on linkedin and someone was like you are lying and i post my link hell yeah i post the link to the chat and they're like you had a secret prompt that told it to be stupid yeah it's prompt injection yeah yeah like you have a system prompt that says like dude.

Speaker 9 Be stupid as shit.

Speaker 9 Be a piece of shit. Oh dude, I messed up.
I put be stupid in my system. I should have put a put a I should have put be smart.
If I put smart it would have worked.

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Speaker 9 So on this, you just reminded me when I was dicking around with Claude Code.

Speaker 9 So I did the story a few months ago about how, you know, I don't know if you've seen like Vibrank, where it's got like people on Claude Code spending like $50,000. I love those people.

Speaker 9 I think they're awesome. Well, to try this myself, I went on, I was like, what is the most token-intensive software you could build me? It's like, oh, yeah, an autonomous car in a metaverse.

Speaker 9 I'm like, cool, build all of that. And it just sat there for house.

Speaker 9 And I don't even know what spat out at the end. Yeah, well, I mean, it's certainly, well, you could have a trillion-dollar startup on your hands.
But it's just

Speaker 9 it's so sick that these things don't even go like, yeah, we can't do that. Like I can't do an autonomous car startup.
I don't have any training data. Very basic.

Speaker 2 But if it was, if it was, if that thing was smart or useful, right? It has the ability to look things up online. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It should have looked through the documentation and it should have said, well, what can we do with timers? What can we do with screen time? Can you hook up a timer to screen time? Exactly.

Speaker 2 We'll let you do this in the background and get the half-hour timing correctly. And it's like,

Speaker 2 it's demoware and it allows you to build demoware.

Speaker 9 But it didn't even build a demo of this.

Speaker 2 Well, so no, it built me something I was kind of excited about because it let me pick the app.

Speaker 2 so i picked gmail and i picked 30 minutes and then it it it worked gmail is turned off right 30 minutes elapse right gmail is not back on oh so you just cut gmail well no so i mean and so you have not been in your email since well not yeah exactly sorry customers if you have been emailing me it is because my app is messed up no but but it it it was like it just lied right i mean and so like that's Imagine being someone, I'm a software developer.

Speaker 2 Someone, okay, whatever.

Speaker 2 I don't know iOS, but I'm going to go on the Apple pages and see what's up. And I'm going to ask some meaningful follow-ups and determine that this didn't work.

Speaker 2 And okay, I lost my hundred bucks in the developer account. But if you don't know how to code, you're going to be like, what are you going to do?

Speaker 9 Well, there's nothing you can do because the reason I read the Replit pages and the cursor pages. And the cursor one, it's people that can code a little.

Speaker 9 At least or a little bit. But Replit is just, it's 50%.
And same with Lovable's Reddit as well. Lovable is another, for listeners, it's another AI coding platform sold as a vibe coding thing.

Speaker 9 And it's all it's 50% people being like, I spent $300.

Speaker 9 And then like 10% people just lying. People be like, I just reached 12,000 MRR monthly recurring revenue.
It's all good for me. And everyone being like, can I see it? And they never respond.
And then

Speaker 9 there's the people who are like, looking for a Replit developer. Yeah.
And it's like, so you're looking for someone that can write software.

Speaker 9 Write and build software. Interesting.

Speaker 9 Like a software developer, one might say. I don't know where to find one.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 it's almost like there are like hundreds of thousands, millions of people trained to do that. But yeah, we don't need them.
We can just

Speaker 9 talk into the thing and turn your app into reality. Except you could, it's just it is really crazy how much vibe coding has proliferated, considering how fucking it's nothing.

Speaker 9 Well, so, but so if you need, like, if you need a prototype, so if like this whole thing boils down to if, if the expectations were real, if it was like,

Speaker 9 turn your sentence into a prototype of an application in minutes. Okay.
Yeah, like an MVP.

Speaker 9 It's not even a while MVP is like

Speaker 9 needs to work.

Speaker 9 Well, okay. Oh, sorry.
I thought you were saying a hypothetical world where it works. Well, no, yeah, sorry.

Speaker 9 Well, no, in a hypothetical world and where it does what it does today, you can get like a mock-up.

Speaker 9 If it's a build a semi-functional wireframe mock-up of your application that you could show to kind of validate your idea to your friends in minutes

Speaker 9 for $30 or however much your credits end up being, that's fine. But does that happen? Doesn't it?

Speaker 9 You could kind of do that. If you're lucky, you can't roll the dice.
That's the thing. It's always, if you're lucky, there's enough asterisks on this.

Speaker 9 It's just insane that it's got this far. Because I've read a lot of vibe coding articles.

Speaker 9 And if you read like Kevin Roos, of course, and the Times and people like that, you read these articles and you'd think, wow, you can just do this. You can just go and do this.

Speaker 9 This is the future is today. But it's not really,

Speaker 2 not really the case at all but i think that the the the thing that's so like pernicious about it is that it's so easy to just say skill issue yeah you just you just two words you're prompting issue you're prompting it wrong david girard david girard thing but no it's yeah you're prompting it wrong you're prompting it wrong and so and there's no real way to disprove that because can we go back in time and like because it's all this probabilistic stuff and so so i have a a post that i've put up and it's it's code doesn't happen to you that's my thing it's go on so it's it's my because I taught programming for a while.

Speaker 2 And so if you're teaching a new programmer, sometimes if they've like if they've kind of gotten unlucky and they have a bad attitude, they're, you know, and it's not their fault, but they might think like coding is really mysterious and it's really weird.

Speaker 2 Right. And I type code in and I press run and it doesn't always do what I want.
And so I'm just going to like mess around. Right.

Speaker 2 And like vibe coding is like a productionized version of code happens to you. It's like you press button, code pops out, it does mysterious thing.

Speaker 2 And then like, you know, so it's like, it's like that idea, which was the wrong way to program, but like, that's the way we're doing it. Like, and you were going to.
And what is the right way, though?

Speaker 2 The right way would be: a computer is like, oh, you, you operate a computer, you turn it on, you open the coding software that you're going to use, whether it's an online software, like my wonderful software, or you know, something like VS Code, like something for professionals, whatever.

Speaker 2 And you type in code and you run it. And then the computer like executes it, runs the code according to the

Speaker 9 programming language.

Speaker 2 The code is instructions. The code is instructions and the code happens deterministically.

Speaker 2 And maybe if you're developing a game, maybe there's some random elements to the software that you're developing, but there's no randomness. The randomness is under your control.

Speaker 9 Yeah. So it's the difference between treating it as this mystic force that you pull together versus instructions.

Speaker 2 It's instructions. And so if you're a really good programmer, And maybe you're whatever, maybe you use AI to save you some typing and you still have that good attitude.
Whatever.

Speaker 2 You can use it to say typing. That's fine.

Speaker 9 I mean, that's the only real value like that that feels like the only consistent thing is just filling in blanks that you know you could yourself like it fills in it's autocorrect and i'm not like i'm not which may be useful i'm not gonna lie like i i use it yeah i like i but i i used to have a paid gpt account but i don't trust it to do like the the models and this is one of the things that i brought up in my post is the models like aren't better now right than

Speaker 9 better well gpt3 was okay and gpt4 was like much better yeah and then gpt5 is trash yeah I mean, right, relatively speaking.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's a little bit better and maybe it costs OpenAI more, which is a big development. It was

Speaker 2 very great for them. And whatever.

Speaker 9 It had to cost them less, but it costs more. I recovered.

Speaker 2 It costs more.

Speaker 2 So it stopped getting better. So there was a time where I was like, I'm going to buy into this.
I'm an early adopter. I'm kind of a booster.

Speaker 9 I was cured.

Speaker 9 It's like going to wheresyoured.at.com.

Speaker 9 Is it.com? It's just where's your ed.at. Oh, where's your ad? Great.

Speaker 9 Nice. Okay.
Where's your ed.at?

Speaker 9 Cured me a little bit of this because I'm like, and I've just had some situations where it's just failed me so poorly. Like there was a confluence of events this summer where I was just like, no.

Speaker 9 What happened? I'm done with this. First of all, I got a strong recommendation from

Speaker 9 GPT to buy a software called Descript, which is like a

Speaker 2 cost editing software.

Speaker 9 Cause I have a YouTube channel and I want to like, I say a lot of ums and ahs, and maybe I'm saying some ums and ahs right now. Whatever.

Speaker 9 Who cares? Yeah. And but I'm like, okay, I'm going to make this YouTube channel.
I want the production quality to be decent. If there's a shortcut for me, seems like AI might be able to do this.

Speaker 9 So

Speaker 9 I'm like to GPT. I'm like, what is good AI? Get rid of ums and Ahs software.
Sure. It says Descript.
Kind of like a Google search. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. So, you know, whatever.
It's an okay Google search.

Speaker 9 Yeah. Whatever.
And so it said, you've got to use descript. And I was like, cool.
And so I put in my credit card, 20 bucks or 30 bucks or whatever, whatever it was.

Speaker 9 Just, I put it in a recording and just completely mangled it. Yep.
And it's just like the audio was unusable. Yeah.

Speaker 9 It was off by an eighth of a second off my voice. And it's just like, there's no way there's, I have no recourse.
And I'm not an audio engineer. And so I just, okay, like I vibe,

Speaker 9 I vibe edited my video and just ruined it.

Speaker 2 It's almost like every promise they make is it's going to automate. Everything is like, ah, not really.
As long as you know what you're doing.

Speaker 9 But this was like a meta-level thing where the AI recommended me. Other AI also screwed me over.
And so I'm like, okay, this is like, this may, this is like, cause I was using it a search, right?

Speaker 9 Yeah. And so it, but, but it failed me a search because it's just emphatically.

Speaker 9 And then you look, because then I was like, well, what's wrong? Am I, is it a skill issue? Am I stupid?

Speaker 2 And so I look and Reddit is just filled with like, this is the worst software. This is the worst software.

Speaker 9 Oh, I. This is the worst offer.
I used the script very briefly. And all I wanted to do was take a bit of audio and turn it into a video with the text happening.

Speaker 9 That the way you read their marketing material, you would look at it and think it would take two seconds. It took me about 45 minutes.

Speaker 9 And it was just by the end of it, I'm like, I don't even want to fucking do it. I'm so angry.
Because it's like, this should be a button press.

Speaker 9 The whole point of AI bullshit is meant it should be a button press. And it never is.
But wait, well, there are other events, though. Well, so there's that.
And so there's that. And then it's like,

Speaker 9 so I'm also, I'm a web developer. Right.
And so I'm not very good. I can't program mobile apps.
That's a thing that I can't do. Don't know how.

Speaker 9 I'm also not a very good like infrastructure systems programmer, whatever. That's

Speaker 9 cloud stuff, whatever. I'm not great at that.
But that is an aspect of my my job that I have to do. Our website requires some infrastructure, difficult stuff.

Speaker 9 Over the years, I've actually gotten quite a bit better at that.

Speaker 9 And so that used to be a use case for me for GPT: oh, I'll ask it some infrastructure-related questions. I'm like, I know how to code,

Speaker 9 I can put the puzzle together. And this is actually going to save me a little bit of time.

Speaker 9 But I have outpaced GPT's ability in infrastructure development. So it's like, okay, well, I'm doing this project and it's not helping.

Speaker 9 It's just wasting my time. Okay.
No need for that. The descripting is BS.
And then I learned from Ed Zitron that this stuff is horrendously expensive.

Speaker 9 So it's like, if this was just regular software as a service and it costs pennies to operate and it was like kind of helpful, whatever.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it'd be inoffensive.

Speaker 9 It would be like, it's fine, whatever. There's a company.
They offered me this thing and it didn't work. And, you know, it happens.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 9 But it's like in the context of a world in which this is the future.

Speaker 2 This is magic.

Speaker 9 In a click of a button, you get perfect audio out.

Speaker 2 If that's the promise, in the midst of all of this, and AI is recommending to it, this is like meta-leveled, like off

Speaker 2 shit on your idiot situation.

Speaker 2 And then it's then it's

Speaker 2 disastrously expensive. Yeah.
Like, what is the point? What is the point of all of this?

Speaker 9 The point is we need to sell GPUs every day. And literally in the car here, they announced a seven-year, $38 billion deal between OpenAI and Amazon Web Services.
It's just like, why?

Speaker 9 So that we can, so that they can do Sora 2 more, so they can generate more copyright infringement.

Speaker 9 It's, and have, do you, have you in the past used these coding models a lot, or is it just kind of like on the side?

Speaker 9 I have, I, so even, like I will say, even like two weeks ago, I had a very discreet task where it was like, in this one situation, I want to do this one little thing. Yeah.

Speaker 9 And I, I knew exactly what it was and I was lazy.

Speaker 2 And so I said, right, write the code. And so I put in, and then this is a joke comment, and people should do this more often.

Speaker 2 I put in a, I pasted in the code and I said, said, this code comes courtesy of ChatGPT. If you have any issues with this software, please contact OpenAI.

Speaker 2 That's what I wrote in my code and I shipped it and it worked. Great.
Whatever. Okay.
That's cool. It saved me 20 minutes.

Speaker 9 That's that's and that's the thing. That's the whole AI bubble.
It's like

Speaker 2 I'm not a paying subscriber anymore.

Speaker 9 Oh, that's even worse for them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no. I just, you know, because it's, it's, the, the stupidest model of theirs could have come up with that code because it was so easy.
Uh, you know, it was, it was finicky, it was annoying.

Speaker 2 There have been situations situations where I'm saying, you know, I say, oh, there's a bug in this code. I paste it in and it looks it over.
And

Speaker 2 it saved me, in aggregate, tens of hours in the last three years.

Speaker 9 That's fine.

Speaker 2 It's like, if it was regular SaaS, I'd be like, cool. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think that's kind of part of why I canceled the subscription. Because if it was,

Speaker 2 you know, whatever, you need to value your time. You know, I could, if it, if it was 20 bucks a month and it saved me an hour a month, hey, you know? Yeah, it's like trip it or flighty.

Speaker 9 Like every little bit of software we pay for and it does a thing. And if it was in the middle of the day, and it wasn't stealing from everyone and burning down.

Speaker 9 It's just it, it only makes sense if it was cheap. And it's the literal opposite.
If this was like cheap, like cheap CPU-driven shit, then fine, sure. But it's like...

Speaker 9 One day I think we're going to find out how expensive this is and it's going to scare the shit out of people. But you know what?

Speaker 9 That actually makes me want to move to a specific post you made, your scaling laws post. Let's talk about this.

Speaker 9 So you were a booster at one point and you read the stuff, sure, but you wrote a very eloquent piece about the scaling laws, about how, and I've tried to work this into my work, but it's

Speaker 9 we can have, I don't know if I'd call it empathy, but some understanding of how we got here with the AI bubble. Because when GPT-4 came out, it does seem like tech people had a reason to be excited.

Speaker 2 I was so excited.

Speaker 9 What was exciting?

Speaker 2 It was awesome. You talked to it and it was just like this.

Speaker 2 I would ask it coding problems that I found. So I was still a teacher at the time.

Speaker 2 And I was like, oh man, like I have the AP computer science exam coming up and I need to like come up with practice problems. And I was like, generate a set of 30 practice problems.

Speaker 2 And I obviously read them over and I did my due diligence and I, you know, I tried the, I did a good job putting them together, but it's like, these are decent. Yeah.

Speaker 2 These are decent practice problems. And like, this is, this is useful software.
I did not understand how expensive it was. But there was, there's a,

Speaker 2 the number of things that would have to happen.

Speaker 9 I will also give you, so the read, the listeners don't get mad.

Speaker 9 To be clear, GPT-4 was 2023 yeah we had we were very early in understanding i mean the environmental damage was there early sure but they were also promising they're fixing that but it took a full year until june 2024 when they it came out that open ai would burn five billion dollars so like early on we didn't really know the costs either and if i'm sure someone will find a link anyway keep going well so but so i was i was pumped up because i i i saw gpt3 was i i you know i'm a tech person and so i remember seeing early demos of gpt3 and it was like interesting novelty.

Speaker 2 It would say stupid things, and it was kind of cool that it could even generate sentences. That was awesome.
3.5 came out, and GPT, whatever, chat GPT, it's like, oh, this is pretty cool.

Speaker 2 I can use it as a search thing, and it says that I'm good, which I like when people say I'm good. Do you like when people say you're good, Ed?

Speaker 9 It doesn't happen very much. But I think, you know what? I'll be honest.
I knit that there's something, I think, mentally about me where all of the anthropomorphization pisses me off.

Speaker 9 Not even pissed me off. I'm just like, okay, shut up, shut up, shut shut up.
I was bullied too much as a kid that like compliments don't work on me anymore.

Speaker 2 I do want to write a thing at some point about how if it wasn't chat GPT, if it was like box git text,

Speaker 2 and there was no anthropomorphization, if it was just like, this is a thing that can generate usable or interesting or like code for you, but there's no chat element to it, that would actually make it a lot better to me.

Speaker 2 Like

Speaker 2 the anthropomorphization of like, oh, you're talking to a person, that really makes me mad.

Speaker 9 Yes. And also I find every time it goes, you got it.
You got it. Shut up, shut up.
Shut up.

Speaker 2 I did. So in one of these NFL ads, literally, I don't know if they're like doing a nod to the haters or what, but they'd like take,

Speaker 2 we're going. We're going a couple levels.

Speaker 9 I'll make sure the link is in the.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, no, there's like four of them. Hopefully they're on YouTube.

Speaker 9 But it's like a guy doing,

Speaker 2 he's trying to do pull-ups. And it's like, here's your pull-up plan.
Like, you need to do one pull-up and then you should do two pull-ups. And then you should do four or five pull-ups.

Speaker 2 And like, eventually you will be able to do several pull-ups.

Speaker 2 And then at the end, it's like, you got this.

Speaker 9 Okay, if

Speaker 9 so, the plan is you do more pull-ups over time. You could probably just work that out by doing pull-ups or texting a mate.

Speaker 9 Nobody said you got this.

Speaker 9 Exactly.

Speaker 9 Actually, no, my friend Mac, when I text him about pull-ups, he says much, he's like, you fucking got this. I think he may have literally.
It's just,

Speaker 9 that's the commercial? That's the commercial. That's the commercial.
But it's the commercial.

Speaker 9 People watching the NFL and they're like, oh, shit. Why should I use chat GPT? Oh, it's going to tell me a pull-up plan where I increase from one to several.

Speaker 2 One to several. You got this.

Speaker 9 You got this.

Speaker 2 I mean, I didn't pause. I mean, maybe, I did not pause the commercial, but

Speaker 2 it could have said some really interesting stuff in the middle. I don't know.
But

Speaker 2 the bullet, because it has to have a bullet of the list.

Speaker 2 I am pretty sure, and I might be lying.

Speaker 2 And so whatever, send me some hate mail, but like, I'm pretty sure it said, like, do a couple, wait a week, you know, drink a protein shake and like, you know, do a couple more.

Speaker 9 It's just Google search, except it makes up the results. That's all that there's three fucking years.

Speaker 2 So I have a new idea, which is that it's Yahoo answers, but the person has a lobotomy and was like, it just did cocaine.

Speaker 9 That's Yahoo answers.

Speaker 2 Yahoo answers.

Speaker 9 That's just Yahoo, or Cora.

Speaker 2 But it's like light speed.

Speaker 9 Yeah, like the fastest. Well, Korra now is GPT.

Speaker 9 Because Adam D'Angelo is on the board of OpenAI. Sweet.
So it's just got GPT answers and GPT questions now. So cool.

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Speaker 9 But early on, it was exciting, and there were these scaling laws. Walk me through

Speaker 9 the listeners who might not understand the screen.

Speaker 2 Sure, so yeah. So the post that I wrote, which I very nicely called eloquent.
So if I could pay you $20 a month to kind of just send me stuff like, you got this.

Speaker 9 Or so eloquent. I'll just, I'll email those.
You got this.

Speaker 2 Okay. That's great.
I'll put it on a schedule. Yeah.

Speaker 9 If you could just do that, I'll pay you 20 bucks a month.

Speaker 2 No, but so there was an idea that if you increase the size of the models, I'm not an AI. That's right.
I'm not an AI scientist.

Speaker 2 And so in this post, I said, I'm not an AI expert or an economist, but like you look at this chart, this chart that they had, and you can like the thing, and I actually think I cited my sources.

Speaker 2 The original like paper basically about the scaling laws, they have this chart that is incredible. It is like make model 10 times bigger, get

Speaker 2 nice jump in performance. Make model 10 times bigger, get nice jump in performance.

Speaker 2 And then the idea is like, okay, well, if we just keep making it 10 times bigger, we will get, like, who knows how good that can get.

Speaker 9 And it kind of, and it did work. Like, and it was working for a minute.
That's how they went, to the best of my knowledge. That's how they went from 3.5 to 4.

Speaker 9 I mean, there's a number of, they have smart people over there. Like, I mean, we can be honest that like, they're doing clever stuff.

Speaker 2 Smart is also a very subjective stuff.

Speaker 9 These are people who are experts in mathematics. Yeah, they're doing hard, real math, and they're getting results.
The fact that it can do what it does is incredible.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's kind of crazy that they can do it.

Speaker 9 If that was all they were saying, if that was all they were saying, if they were just like, we did research and we've created this incredible piece of technology that feels almost alien at this point.

Speaker 9 I mean, or at the point when we discovered it. Now it feels like, you know, just we take it for granted that it's kind of this trash thing.

Speaker 9 But like, at the moment when it was released, it was like, oh my gosh, like, this is actually crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 9 And the idea was we make it 10 times bigger and we will get a similar jump in performance. And that is GPT 4.5, which is like a footnote in history.
Oh, that was... That was released.

Speaker 9 And Sam Altman was just like, yeah, well, we need big model. It was the best announcement ever.
I'm actually going to put it. But from what I remember,

Speaker 9 Clammy Sammy was like, yeah, you know, I'm just going to do it from memory. I remember.

Speaker 9 It was like, yeah, good news. It's really good

Speaker 9 for writing. Bad news, it's really computer And everyone's like, yay.

Speaker 9 And in the announcement, I did quote this in the post because I don't want to make stuff up and like, whatever.

Speaker 9 But they literally said with each 10x, with each order of magnitude, you know, 10x increase in model size, we will get an improvement in performance. Yes.

Speaker 9 But like, where's the, like, where's the big improvement? It's gone. I don't, I think that was them.
I think that was the moment. I don't know what day they announced 4.5, but like, I think.

Speaker 9 Seperi in 2022. That was the, that was game over.
Yeah. And then they did the reasoning stuff and the reasoning stuff was the reasoning thing was September 2024.

Speaker 9 And I remember my favorite thing about that was reading all the tech press writing about it and being like, can any of you tell me what this does?

Speaker 9 Can any of you tell me why this matters? To this day. And I'm, by the way, I'm not actually, it took a minute for me to work out what the fuck.
And it's just a hat on a hat thing.

Speaker 9 It's like instead of spitting out an output, it goes, what would the output be? Oh, I will skip, I will go through it and choose these steps, which is, it's test time compute and it's meant to.

Speaker 9 And I could have had a moment of reflection when the reasoning models came out where, because I was like,

Speaker 9 it was still the height of the fever, though. I know, but I asked it a hard question.
So

Speaker 9 I did a math degree and a computer science degree. So I was like, take this topic from sophomore year abstract algebra and do this like visualization of the thing.

Speaker 9 And I took one of the early reasoning models, whichever one I was like, like 01, sure. Because it's like, you have a PhD level thing in the pocket.
Okay. So PhD level thing should be able to take

Speaker 9 a sophomore math, sophomore in college math concept and visualize it. Yeah.
You should be able to do that. And then it didn't.
Oh.

Speaker 9 And then I kind of just didn't. I was kind of just like, oh, I guess I, hmm.
And then I just didn't think about it. And then I just kept on kind of hoping that something exciting would happen.
Yeah.

Speaker 9 And I couldn't, and it's a bit of empathy here. I get if you're, and at that time, so it was September 2024, a month later they'd raised $6.6 billion to get a credit facility of $4 billion.

Speaker 9 Like they, it looked like OpenAI was going places, unless you're like me and you've read every single possible financial thing you can get a hand on and you've obsessed over the numbers.

Speaker 9 But I can get why someone who was thick within the booster ring might not immediately be like, fuck.

Speaker 9 Because... Yeah, I don't know if people hadn't built things with reasoning.
And it did actually take a few months for people to work out products with reasoning. Yeah, I mean, and whatever.

Speaker 9 I mean, I don't know what the improvements were. And they improved on the benchmarks.
That's fine. It's kind of like, and I'm sure that the coding results are marginally better.

Speaker 9 And that's the thing is that marginally. Yeah.
It's always marginal. But now it's marginally.
But that's the thing. Three to four was sick.
Huge jump. That was sick.
That was not marginal.

Speaker 9 If you had a, if you had, if your lights were on, if you were paying attention and you typed a thing into three and you typed a thing into four, you should be impressed. Oh, I remember the jump.

Speaker 9 I wasn't doing better offline at the time. Didn't do that until February 2024.
But I remember being like, oh, that's, but I remember just being like, okay, now now what?

Speaker 9 Like, I was, I was, it was like, wow, we made a computer do this and this. Cool.
Okay. Now what? Yeah.
And so like, I was vaguely aware of the, of the line chart that I mentioned in that post.

Speaker 9 And so I was like, oh, like all they have to do, it was like, it is a freight train towards like actual, really cool thing because it's like, just make it bigger.

Speaker 9 And therefore, if we just need to make it bigger, then we do need more compute.

Speaker 9 And the reasoning models were, you finally got another way to throw compute because it's the training compute and more compute to generate an answer, test time compute. Wow.
Yeah. So

Speaker 9 like that's, that's where the, the, the freight train is over. Yeah.
And I, and I just, 4.5 came out, didn't really think about it that hard. They start doing the reasoning stuff.

Speaker 9 And it's like, okay, well, they have marginal improvements and they say it did really good on a Math Olympiad or whatever. And like, that's, that's interesting.

Speaker 9 But, but then it's like another whole year goes by. And then, and then GPT-5 comes out.
And like, what, what was that? It was nothing. It was so strange.
And so that, that was the final.

Speaker 9 So when I'm talking about my confluence of events that cured me of my boosterism, like I started reading your stuff about it being expensive.

Speaker 2 But then I was like, this is interesting. I've started reading this guy, Ed's posts.
GPT-5 is coming out next week. I wonder if this guy is going to have an extraordinary amount of egg on his face.

Speaker 2 Yes, that's right.

Speaker 2 You might have been scared.

Speaker 9 I wasn't because I have the Stone Will of the Buddha, but it's, I was also just like, when it...

Speaker 9 When reasoning was coming up, going back to 2023,

Speaker 9 there was some real shit. The rumors around around that.
QStar.

Speaker 9 The reason Sam Altman got fired was they found a terrifying new AI. They kind of like drummed up.
There were leaks about it. There were leaks about levels of intelligence.

Speaker 9 There was all of these big leaks. There was really no leaking around GPT-5 other than a Wall Street Journal story towards the end of 2024 where it was like, yeah, it's costing a shit ton of money.

Speaker 9 It isn't working very well. Like the leaks, the reason I, because the thing is, I mean this this day.
If I am wrong about all this, I don't think I am. I will admit it.
I will explain why.

Speaker 9 But GPT-5, I wasn't particularly worried about because it did, I could not fucking tell you what the, what it was going to be.

Speaker 9 Like no one really, if you go back to 2023 and you look up GPT-5 stuff, the shit that people are saying is insane.

Speaker 9 There was someone saying it would be completely autonomous and it would turn weapon systems against people. There's bonkers shit.

Speaker 9 But getting up to it, yeah, it was kind of a proving point, but it was just another fucking model.

Speaker 9 Well, and so, and so that I, you and I started exchanging emails because I, whatever, i i saw your podcast and i said something on my post over and it was it was it was interesting talking to you and then i i when that when the announcement was going on i emailed you and you got a lot of emails coming through but i said ed ed ed ed ed ed ed they announced paywalled chat colors yes i go through it no no i remember this but go through this in the announcement of gpt5

Speaker 9 The biggest thing ever. They're like, for our paid subscribers, you can turn your chat yellow.
Which they still haven't released. They still haven't released that? I don't.
think. Well,

Speaker 9 I'm not a paying subscriber.

Speaker 9 I've never seen a yellow.

Speaker 9 I'm paying for chat GPT plus. See if you can turn it yellow.
I'm going to see if I can do this live on air. Yellow or pink? Green might be an option.
I'm going to change my window color.

Speaker 9 Well, the window's not color. On GPT.

Speaker 9 Are you Google?

Speaker 9 GPT. No, I'm going to ask it because it's fucking insane if this doesn't.
Searching the web. Yes, you can change.
They did.

Speaker 9 Well,

Speaker 9 can you, though?

Speaker 9 On some platforms, you can change the accent color. God, this fucking stinks.
The fact that you can't ask a product what it does.

Speaker 9 Well, if you can't ask, like, I don't know what's a good idea, but I mean, if you can't ask, if you can't type into a Google Doc in 2007, what does Google Docs do? That's unsurprising.

Speaker 9 But that's because Google Docs is a place to write words. This is meant to answer things.
Well, I know, that's what I'm saying. But it's like

Speaker 9 they claim that it's this all, you know, all-knowing, omniscient thing, and it cannot tell you how to turn. Shouldn't it have just done it for you? Yeah, or give me the button.

Speaker 9 it should have said Ed great question would you like it to be blue yellow pink exactly or or charizard orange

Speaker 9 and and like but where was the butt where was it that's what it should have done and also the idea that that was one of the announcements is very cool I love the idea that they're like it's the biggest moment ever and you can now make chat GPT brown it's insane it's insane that I don't know if brown is one of the supported colors probably for next year yeah that

Speaker 9 relies on the compute actually the Oracle deal unlocks Brown. Unlox Brown.
Oh, my God. It's so cool that we've built our entire economy on top of this as well.
But the GPT-5 thing,

Speaker 9 it was such a weird moment because

Speaker 9 watching everyone try and be excited about it was really good. There was the whole Theo Wait, not Theo Wait, and that's these are the information.
Theo.

Speaker 9 There's this fucking guy. Now I'm going to, I really shouldn't have blanked.
I've mentioned him. He did a whole thing about GPT-5.

Speaker 9 I'm going to look this up live on air. This is a professional show.

Speaker 9 Where he did a whole thing saying GPT-5 is the most amazing thing ever.

Speaker 9 Oh, and then walked it back. And then had to be like, yeah, actually, yes,

Speaker 9 Theo Brown. There we go.
Theo Brown. He did the thing saying, I'm scared of how good GPT-5 is.
Then a week later, he's like, actually, it's not the same as when I used it, which is crazy.

Speaker 9 That should have been a scandal. Like, why was that the case? But everyone just kind of moved on.
But I don't know what we're meant to be excited about next. Okay.

Speaker 9 GPT-6.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah.

Speaker 9 It's just, but also what's that meant to, because GPT-5 was this weird kind of like myth in the future. It's like, when we reach this, everything will get better.

Speaker 9 But now it's like, we're going to get Claude Sonnet 5, I guess. Yeah, whatever.
I mean, you're going to get the next one. But that's the thing.
If it's just continued marginal improvement, what am I

Speaker 9 doing?

Speaker 9 It doesn't make me, that does not make me excited. And yes, it can save software engineers typing time and whatever.
I mean, if you know what you're doing, you can get a lot done, I guess that's fine.

Speaker 9 If that's the way you like to work, if you like to type stuff in and wait on loading screens and get your code out and review it, that's a way to do programming. That's fine.
Yeah. And it's

Speaker 9 literally fine. I'm actually like, it sounds super sarcastic, but like, that's literally fine.
No, but that's literally fine would be if this was a $10 billion industry.

Speaker 9 If they were selling it as like the equivalent of virtualization or like some side thing to the greater cloud compute infrastructure,

Speaker 9 not the entire future revenue engine because it isn't that it's no, I mean, I, and, and so I, you know, I run a business and I think that, so a thing that startup people say is they say like, you have product market fit, which is like, oh, your product is good.

Speaker 9 Yeah. If like one of the criteria is if it went away today, would your users like throw a fit? Yeah.
Would you throw a fit if ChatGPT got uninstalled from your phone? You wouldn't.

Speaker 9 But like, you know, would the general person be that upset? And I don't think they would. I think that there would be a contingent of people who'd be very upset.

Speaker 9 If you have a like parasocial army, that's the right word. Yeah, if you're like in love with your GPT, then that would be like a death in your family.
And that's very sad for you.

Speaker 9 Which would be horrible. And indeed, they, but it's like, I've been saying this for a while.
It's like, and I say it to boosters. It's like, if this disappeared, would your life change?

Speaker 9 Would it really change that much? And like, well, I used it for baby names. I've used it for, it's like, you named your baby after me.
No, I'm just saying, like, if you like.

Speaker 9 If you've got a baby name from chat GPT, that's...

Speaker 2 That's tough.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's really bad.

Speaker 9 That was said to me by a booster. The more I think about it, the more I'm like, brother, one day your child is going to hear this.

Speaker 2 Because all they do is they sell a book called the Baby Name Book.

Speaker 2 It has like a list of names in it.

Speaker 9 I don't fucking know. Read some books.

Speaker 2 Just think about it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 9 I'm going to, one of the most important choices, the identity of a future human, I'm going to send it to.

Speaker 9 incorrect Google search. Yeah.
It's

Speaker 9 it's depressing, but it's also quite funny because I feel like this era has really revealed who just doesn't know anything about fucking it.

Speaker 9 Like the people who are just like, will believe anything or will just believe that they are smart at something because a machine told them they are. Yeah.
That they got this.

Speaker 9 You got this. You got this.

Speaker 2 So someone online posted, I can't wait for the day when there's an AI agent that'll tell me when my friend's birthdays are.

Speaker 9 Fuck. There's no other way to do that.
There's no way to do that.

Speaker 9 I don't have like some kind of calendar. No, no, it's got to be a reminder.

Speaker 9 And so that's like, that's what's happening now is that in the like startup space or just people building technology, it's like, well, we're going to get, or, or if you like watch the ads on the NFL or whatever, it's like you are going to

Speaker 9 agent is going to do the thing that software is supposed to do. Like software, so like I got sold at one point accounting software that was AI.
Right. AI is going to categorize your transactions.

Speaker 9 Sure. Can't do it.

Speaker 9 I bought, I was at a conference and it was, you know, whatever,

Speaker 9 May 20th, May 21st, May 22nd. I go to Starbucks.
I go to Pizza. I go to Thing.
They're all travel-related expenses. One is travel, and then the Starbucks is client conversation.

Speaker 9 That's what I decided. Client conversation.
And so I had a meeting with the founder of the thing, and I was like, dude, like, what are you, what is it? What is this? What did they say?

Speaker 9 Well, they were just like, oh, you know, sometimes it makes mistakes. We should get on that.
Fuck yeah.

Speaker 9 So that's, that's my accountant. Yeah.

Speaker 9 You, my whole thing is, I know I think with all of this AI coding stuff in the big, in the big tech realm, something's going to break.

Speaker 9 Something really, but someone's going to, someone's going to do something stupid. Yeah.
Well, so back to Replit, I mean, I, I think that they,

Speaker 9 I kind of hope that they're,

Speaker 9 I don't know if they hope that they're first to go. I mean, whatever.
They're nice people working there. So that's the unfortunate thing is there are nice people working at these.

Speaker 9 There are people with jobs.

Speaker 9 It will involve people. Like I don't, I wouldn't want to to ask for people to get laid off who are hardworking people.

Speaker 9 And some of them are like cool scientists who have studied hard and they're nice people. And the grim part of all this is like, people are going to lose fucking jobs.

Speaker 9 I mean, it's the executives who obviously piss me off who are just lying through their teeth. Right.
I mean, those people deserve to.

Speaker 9 But they're never actually going to have a bad outcome happen to them.

Speaker 9 Which is why we need to write things to put their name, because at some point there needs to be a record of this. Of course.
Yeah. So I'm going to wrap it there.
Charlie, where can people find you?

Speaker 9 I have a blog, blog.charliemeyer.co, which is like where kind of my writings go, but I'm also trying to set up a newsletter. So that's csmeyer.substack.com.

Speaker 2 And my name is spelled M-E-Y-E-R. Hell yeah.

Speaker 9 And I, of course, am Ed Zittron. You can find me on the internet at google.com.
That's where I live.

Speaker 9 I will put all the links to Charlie's stuff, of course, in the episode notes, but it's good for you to hear it now. And yes, should have a monologue coming up this week.

Speaker 9 I know I did an announcement where I said I was going to to have a big story. That is on hold, not because anything went wrong, but because the scale of the information I got has changed dramatically.

Speaker 9 When I eventually talk about this, it'll be a lot of fun. Otherwise, catch you soon.

Speaker 2 Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matosowski.
You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com.

Speaker 2 M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

Speaker 2 You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter.

Speaker 2 I also really recommend you go to chat.where's your ed.at to visit the Discord and go to r/slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

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