Monologue: AI Isn't Replacing Software Companies, Calm Down About Claude Code

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts, then add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-iHeart. CallZone Media. Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

0:36So 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 code and have it barf out an identical functional clone that's compliant, secure, stable, or because somebody was able to bonk it on the head enough times to spit out something that sort of looked like a tool like Trello maybe, or a personal website.

1:11Look, 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 in 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 customer's systems?

1:46Well, you're going to need a SOC 2 audit. 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 teams, probably for good, to be honest, to maintain your new internal Salesforce, Monday, Microsoft 365, and Notion clones, your Trello clone as well, probably your Asana. I mean, how much software are you going to 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$15 per seat per month, you've also fired the people whose job it is to make sure your nasty little software subscriptions actually fucking function.

2:31And 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 it, 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.

3:03I'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-coder 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 we'll be able to do more than that in the future. I plead with the media, please stop filling in the gaps.

3:40Please stop seeing every incremental improvement as proof of whatever marketing slot Wario Amadei 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 underselling 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?

4:18When 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$20 a month clawed subscription, you can spend over$100 of Anthropics API tokens. And on the$200 a month, about$2 ,300 to$2 ,700. 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.

5:03The 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, you're shit out of luck. You actually do need to code. And even the things that you vibe code aren't really secure or functional. And even that mediocre web slop you're seeing spooged out by Claude Code is heavily subsidized. If people had to pay the real rates, those people you see jacking off on Twitter about Claude Code, they'd be paying$200 plus a day.

5:44Do 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 Claude Code writing all their 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 don't think people should be laid off, but if this was doing the thing that they were saying it would, it would be happening and it 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.

6:16And if you look at Vibe-coded apps, they all kind of look the same. And that's a result of them all 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 diddly little app but expand that to a 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 90 % of our codes are written by AI great what happens in three years or four years when you go and look back on that you go shit why did we do that oh the person left or the person didn't leave they've just been drinking heavily and I 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 or when you have to make things more efficient.

7:20And 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, spooged 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 charged, people are going to drop this shit like a bad habit. I can't wait. I'm going to be smug about it. I'm going to be annoying about it. I'm not going to lie. But I think based on the YouTube comments, you're all going to join me.

8:01Now, next week we've got more hater season and I'll be back with one of these monologues maybe, or perhaps I'll give you multiple interviews. Done some weird ones. Got Victoria 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.

8:45based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult?

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