Better Offline - Vibe Coding is BS w/ Charlie Meyer

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York City. Ed is joined in-studio by founder and writer Charlie Meyer to talk about the BS of vibe coding, why the valley went so crazy about scaling laws, and the realities of AI coding.https://blog.charliemeyer.co/ https://csmeyer.substack.com/ Code Doesn’t Happen To You - https://csmeyer.substack.com/p/code-doesnt-happen-to-you The Trillion Dollar Chart (scaling laws piece) - https://blog.charliemeyer.co/the-trillion-dollar-chart/ Replit’s Existential Problem - https://blog.charliemeyer.co/replits-existential-problem/ Want to support me? Get $10 off a year’s subscription to my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/w08jbm4jwg it would mean a lot! YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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wherever you get your podcast. AllZone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. We're here in the beautiful IHot Radio studios in New York City, and I've got a guest, of course, Charlie Meyer, the esteemed blogger and CEO of Picot. Charlie, thank you for joining me.

Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. 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. And I think your scaling laws piece was the one that really got it going. Yeah, so I, I, uh, My blog gets some love and mostly hate on Hacker News. That's my distribution channel. Right.

And so I'm trying to get off of that. We're going to try and build 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 haters in there. So what is it that's pissing them off? So, like, I had to post a few weeks back that was on, I called it LLMs or the ultimate demoware. Right. And so I defined DemoWare as software that you make the software and it works.

well in the 30 minutes that you're showing it out to executives or whoever's going to buy it. Right. And then it doesn't do the thing. Right. It doesn't do the thing day to day. And so I listed some examples and my startup's in ETEC, right? 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.

Of course. But so I said, oh, I listed out a few things that I thought were demo wear. So it's like, oh, vibe coding that makes dashboards. Right. You know, that's an easy thing to pick on. And then I said, you know, AI tutors. 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. Yeah, well, we'll talk to a person. 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, we can name names for me too, but I actually don't know how to pronounce them. So, uh, 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. It's like it's a classic like 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 have never tried it and it's like what if I like have like what if this is like actually the thing I spend my time on is thinking about this. You're a non-a-I-idee right

so a coding environment. Yeah yeah well and that yeah we got yeah lots of that lots of that lots of that But like, so the software that I make bouncing around a little bit here, but Replit was a, is a company. And so Replit was a very loved by teachers IDE online. 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 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. Right.

It's kind of like my background as an engineer and then a teacher. And I used Replit, and it was awesome. And was this before they used AI? This was before they used AI. So Repplet, just for the listeners, right now, Repplet 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?

So it used to be an excellent tool. Just an absolutely fantastic tool. It was just you go on, you log on, like Google Docs for coding. Right. So like you think, okay, well, you back in the day, you'd have to download Microsoft Word and whatever. and that sucks and, you know, it's great to bring that online into the cloud. And they did that. And they were like very innovative. They were kind of first to market of having like a very fully featured online IDE.

And that is useful for exactly one thing. And that is useful for teaching in schools. Because like, you have kids and they have $200 Chrome books that the school bought them. 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. or the AI. And now it's just... And now it's... So, listeners, you 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 wallet inspector. And so now that's kind of like...

I've gotten rid of most of my, like, doom scrolling places. But like, this is... I don't know what type of scrolling it is, but like, I go on R. Replit... Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's just so funny. It's just guy being like, yeah, spend $1,500. It doesn't really... work? Yeah. 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, we can be reasonable, Ed. We can bring the numbers down to reality. It's, I spent $50, which for a person who has got a bad software idea, 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, so they're just like skill issue. Well, that and also the people who are like, I too am running into this problem. And then a lot of that. Yeah, where it's like, but Repplet, just for, for anyone on there, on Replet right now, like what do they do to teachers? So teachers, they had a product for teachers that worked. Yeah, what happened to the teachers? And on this November somethingth, 2023, this is a big day for my business, because the only reason I have my business is to replace Replet. Oh, because they turned on AI auto-complete for kids. No way to shut it off.

Doesn't that defeat the purpose of learning? Yeah. So I have a small YouTube channel with not a million subscribers. But, you know, I talked to teachers on there and, you know, 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 missed the fact that the AI got turned on, no one sent him an announcement or an email or a warning. So all of his students were just amazing.

He was like, yeah, everybody, everybody got an A that semester. Like, I wonder, and it, you know. Did that actually, so did students actually end up getting great scores because no one noticed the AI going on? 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 isn't. And just for the listeners as well, Scott's got spelled out. So with these AI platforms, you hit tab complete because it's basically like autocorrect. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And so, so like AI, for what it's worth, you know, we can be really balanced podcast. Sure. But AI can really well, it can solve intro to computer science for ninth grader problems with the incredible accuracy. Well, that's Carl Brown from the internet at Bugssey said it makes the easy things easier and the harder things harder. 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. That's incredible. It'll one shot in your ninth grade program. It's this term. That term just listeners is like, it means that you just give it a problem and it solves it correctly.

Yeah, so it's like count to 10. And the AI can count to 10, which is incredible. That's revolutionary. But fun fact, if you try and make chat GPT count to a million, it freaks out. If you do the voice mode, Adam Conover told me this one. If you go and count to a million, it stops around 9 or 10 and then says, should I continue? And it just won't do it. It's very funny. I love living in the future. Yeah, so they, though, they turn on the AI, and then they were like, we're not doing education. And companies have deprecated things. Yeah, yeah, it happens. It's usually not their main product. Whatever. So, I mean, I'll tell you, you know, I'm an indie developer or whatever, like,

on software does not make a ton of money because there isn't that much money selling an online ID to schools. There's money, but it's not a billion dollar business. It's fine. I don't know there's replet. Well, yeah, but 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. Like, you can't, of course, you're not going to raise a billion. That's not a billion dollar business. No.

But the AI thing seems magical. And then, you know, the vibe coding thing happened. And, you know, as soon as the vibe coding stuff started happening, they were like, we're all in on this. And they deleted. They deleted. They deleted. So not just deprecated, right? So it's one thing to deprecate software. And deprecate is when you stop supporting it. You say 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 to do. But it happens. Software changes, you know, replet for what it's worth to be nice and fair to them. Like, they have investors and they're under the gun to provide some returns. And so whatever, the teacher thing isn't going to make them a ton of money, but they deleted the stuff. And when you say the stuff, was this like projects that schools

had been working on? 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. Deleted. Gone. Monsters? Deleted. Actual monsters? And now... But they sent the warning email, Ed. Wow. In July, when are teachers online looking at their work email in July? Yeah, classic big month for teachers to be on the computer. 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. And was there any way to back it up? Well, there was until they deleted it all. That's so cool.

It's awesome. 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, Replet, they launched Agent 3. Oh, yeah. That was my favorite launcher of 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. It's just like, why don't you go off and build me a software thing? And it just fucking spends $100 and goes,

I don't know, you like this? I don't fucking care. And then they had to release the thing where you could make it think less. They had to like add tweaks to it because it was so bad. 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. I don't, it should not be legal to lie like, because it is a fucking lie. So I will, I'll defend the vibe coder. Oh, God. Platforms out here. Okay, but, but the defense,

No, I mean, it's fraudulent, right? I mean, like, if you say, hey, you don't know how to code at all, and, yeah, just sign on to this website. I mean, look at their marketing page. That's exactly what I'm loading. Okay, perfect, yeah. With a nice blue iPhone air. Oh, yeah, beautiful blue.

I have the space black. Hell yeah. The iPhone air rise up. 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. 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. I think if you asked Replit to do that, it would cost $300 and nothing would happen. I think it would just funk out a like barely functional code. So I wrote a post on this and I was excited to end, 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. And so the case studies are we sold to enterprises and

we're going to do prototypes of internal dev tools. Or not dev, not dev tools, internal like, you know, management software for inside your back office software. So they haven't had a case study since what looks like August. And one of them is how Zinus saves $140,000 with Replit. But it also cuts development time by 50%. But 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. It's not vibe coding. It's not vibe coding. It's just you could have used cursing. You could have used any VS code or what is it? 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 was like, that's going to send information to the Chinese. It's like... Will it? I don't know. I don't think your clone of flappy bird is got to be taken up with. Yeah.

So 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. And I'm not going to dox this person because they were nice to me once. Right. But like there's a person online. 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, fully, and I don't know how to code.

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. That's so 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.

So like they know what an API is and they know what a web server is and they know the names and the different technologies. And like that's going to get them part of the way there. 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. No, that's kind of, and your demoware 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. And someone else did a really good one was like shovelware. They said, where's the shovelware?

Where's the crap software? 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. Why isn't that happening? Yeah, I mean, so you'll see, okay, I made flappy bird. I made a weird thing. I made, like, you can make little small pieces of software for yourself that maybe have a little bit of value. It is fun.

It is a novelty. Yes. If you know, like, but then it doesn't work. Like, so I do not know. I'm a web developer. Yeah. So I know how to do web apps. I can't code for shit.

Whatever. But like, that's what I know. That's what I've been doing. I've been coding for whatever. And I know how to do that. 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. I don't... And also, if it did what it... However I may feel about AI, if it actually did, if vibe coding was real,

that would actually be a huge deal. That would be a huge fucking deal. I wouldn't... I would have all my ethical concerns, if I could actually build software without knowing anything? Wow, that would be great. Never been the case.

But you tried, though. 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 Snoose. It takes... So you say, I want Gmail, I want it snooze for a half hour.

Got it. So that when I open up the Gmail app, it uses a screen time thing and it says blocked. 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. 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. It's like, oh, yeah, you're awesome. You are killing it, dude. This is a great idea. You got this. You got this, yeah, which it actually does say. Yeah, yeah. And one of there, I've been watching like the World Series or whatever and a lot of NFL and like the chaty BT hats, we can hopefully talk about that.

Oh, I haven't caught any of those. Okay. Oh, no, no, I love to hear about this because I'm a Raiders fan. Yeah. And 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. So wait, but keep going, though. Okay.

So it's like, you got this. But then it's, this is the, whatever. So they have haiku and they have sonnet and they have opus. Yes. So whatever, awesome names. But so they have sonnet, which is the really good one. You know, just hacking these posts. Yeah, it's very well respected.

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 $20. I'm just going to see what happens. 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. Sure. See if I make my Apple developer account back.

Yeah. To dump the $100 into the Apple developer account. I also want Apple, by the way. You can't actually do have the app coding that you need to without paying them 100 bucks. So good. That's a business. That's Apple, baby. But anyways, so I do that.

I want to make my hundred bucks back. But it cannot be done. Well, the app, you couldn't build the app, though, it would sound. 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 should do. I think 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. But here's the thing as well with all of this. 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've posted online like, okay, you know, three bees in blueberry, that thing.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. And people, I posted that on LinkedIn, and someone was like, you are lying. And I post my link. Hell yeah. Post the link to the chat, and they were like, you had a secret prompt that told it to be stupid. Yeah, it's prompt injection. Yeah, like, you have a system prompt that says like, and it's like, dude, I did it.

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

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Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

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mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast, it's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told, and for people who are chasing something bigger. So if you've ever supported me, or you're just chasing down a dream, this is right where you need to be. Listen to the Clifford show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more behind the scenes, follow at Clifford and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. So on this, you just reminded me when I was dicking around with Claude Codod. So I did the story a few months ago about how, you know, I don't know if you've seen like

Vibranc where it's got like people on Claudec spend like $50,000. I love those people. 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, I hear an autonomous car in a better verse. I'm like, cool, build all of that. And it just sat there for house.

And I don't even know what it sped out at the end. Well, I mean, it certainly, well, you could have a. trillion-dollar startup on your hands. You should check out that code. 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. But if it was, if that thing was smart or useful, right, it has the ability to look things up online. Yeah. You should have looked through the documentation and it sort of said, well, what can we do a timers? What can we do a screen time? Can you hook up a timer to screen time? Exactly. We'll let you do this in the background and get the half hour time incorrectly. And it's

like, it's, it's demoware. And it allows you to build down. But it didn't even build a demo of this. Well, so no, it built me something I was kind of excited about because it let me pick the app. So I picked Gmail and I picked 30 minutes and then it it worked. Gmail is turned off. Right. 30 minutes elapsed. Right.

Gmail is not back on. Oh. So you just cut Gmail. Well, no. Yeah, exactly. Sorry customers. If you have been emailing me, it is because my app is messed up. No, but it was like, it just lied, right?

I mean, and so like, that's, imagine being someone, I'm a software developer. So I'm like, okay, whatever. Like, I'm going to, I don't know iOS, but like, 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. 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? 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, being at least or a little bit.

But Replit is just, it's 50%. And same with Loveables Reddit as well. Loveable's another, for listeners, it's another AI coding platform sold as a vibe coding thing. And it's all, it's 50% people being like, I've spent $300. And then like 10% people just lying. People are like, I just reached 12,000 MRI monthly recurring revenue. It's all good for me. And everyone being like, can I see it?

And they never respond. And then there's the people who are like looking for a Replit developer. Yeah. And it's like, so you're looking for something? someone that can write software. It's interesting. Like a software developer, one might say. I don't know where to find more.

It's almost like there are like hundreds of thousands, millions of people trying to do that. But yeah, we don't need them. We can just talk into the thing and turn your app into reality. Except you could. It's just, it is really crazy how much vibe coding is proliferate, considering how fucking it's nothing. Well, so if you need, like, if you need a prototype, so if, like, this whole thing boils down to if the expectations were real, if it was like, turn your sentence into a prototype of an application in minutes. Okay.

Yeah, like an MVP. Not even, well, MVP is like, it needs to work. Well, okay. Oh, sorry, I thought you were saying a hypothetical world where it works. Well, no, yeah, sorry. Well, no, in a hypothetical world and where it does, what it does. today, you can get like a mock-up. Yeah.

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. Yeah. For $30 or however much your credits end up being, that's fine. But does that happen? You could kind of do that. If you're lucky, if you roll the dice. That's the thing.

It's always, if you're lucky, there's enough asterisks on this. It's just insane that it's got this far because I've read a lot of vibe coding articles. And if you read Kevin Rousse, of course, in 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. This is the future is today. But it's not really, not really the case at all. But I think that the thing that's so, like, pernicious about it is that it's so easy to just say skill issue. Yeah. You're just two words. You're prompting it wrong. You're prompting it wrong.

David Gerard. David Gerard thing. But now, it's, yeah, 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 post that I've put up and it's, it's code doesn't happen to you. That's my thing. Go on. So it's my, because I taught programming for a while.

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. Right. And I type code in and I press run and it doesn't always do what I want. And so I'm just kind of like mess around. Right. 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 a mysterious thing. and then like, you know, so it's like that idea, which was the wrong way to program, but like that's the way we're doing it, like, and we're going to sell it to you. And what is the right way, though? The right way would be a computer is like,

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. And you type in code and you run it, and then the computer, like, executes it runs the code according to the programming language. The code is instructions. Code is instructions and the code like happens deterministically

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 like the randomness is under your control. Yeah, so it's the difference between treating it as this mystic force that you pull together versus instructions. It's instructions. And so like 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. Like you can use the safe typing. fine. I mean, that's the only real that, like, 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, which may be useful. I'm not going to lie. Like, I use it. Yeah. Yeah, like I, but I used to have a paid GPT account, but I don't trust it to do, like, the models, and this is one of the things that I brought in my post is that the models, like, aren't better now, right? They're not better? Well, GPT3 was okay and the GPT4 was like much better.

And then GPD 5 is trash. I mean, relatively speaking. Maybe it's a little bit better. And maybe it costs Open AI more, which is a big development. Very fine. Great for them. And whatever. It's better.

It costs them less, but it costs more. It costs more. But so stop 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. Like I was cured by going to where's your ed. dot at.

Yes, there we are. Is it dot com? Yeah, it's just where's your ed. Dot at? Oh, where's your ed. It's great. Nice. Okay.

Where's your ed. that 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. What happened? I'm done with this. First of all, I got a strong recommendation from GPT to buy a software called Descript, which is like editing.

Oh, fucking podcast editing software. Because I have a YouTube channel and I want to like, I say a lot of ums and Oz and maybe I'm saying some ums and Oz right now, whatever. Who cares? Yeah. 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, it seems like AI might be able to do this.

So I'm like, to GPT, I'm like, what does good AI get rid of ums and Oz software? Sure. It's just Descript. Kind of like a Google search. Yeah, oh, yeah. So whatever, it's an okay Google search. Yeah, whatever. And so it said, you've got to use Descript.

And I said, cool. And so I put in my credit card, a car, 20 bucks or 30 bucks or whatever it was. I put it in a recording and just completely mangled it. Yep. And it's just like the audio was unused. usable. 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, I vibe edited my video and it just ruined it. It's almost like every promise they make is it's going to automate

everything. It's like, ah, not really. As long as you know what you're doing. But this was like a meta level thing where the AI recommended me other AI that also screwed me over. And so I'm like, okay, this is like, because I was using it a search, right? Yeah. And so, But it failed me a search because it's just emphatically. And then you look, because then I was like, well, what's wrong? Am I? Is it a skill issue? Am I stupid? And so I look and Reddit is just filled with like, this is the worst software. 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. The way you read their marketing material, you would look at it and think it would take two seconds. took me about 45 minutes. 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.

The whole point of AI bullshit is meant it should be in 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, 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. I'm also not very good like infrastructure, systems programmer, whatever. That's cloud stuff, whatever. I'm not great at that. But that is an aspect of my job

that I have to do. Our website requires some infrastructure, difficult stuff. Over the years, I've actually gotten quite a bit better at that. And so that used to be a use case for me for GPT was like, oh, I'll ask you some infrastructure-related questions.

I'm like, I know how to code. I can put the puzzle together, and this is actually going to save me a little bit of time. Right. But I have outpaced GPT's ability and infrastructure development. So it's like, okay, well, I'm doing this project and it's not helping.

Yeah. It's just wasting my time. Okay. No need for that. The descript thing is BS. And then I learned from Ed Zittron that this stuff is horrendously expensive. So it's like if this was just regular software's service and it cost pennies to operate and, you know, it's like kind of helpful, whatever. Yeah, be inoffensive.

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. Yeah. But it's like in the context of a world in which this is the future, this is magic. in a click of a button, you get perfect audio out. If that's the promise, in the midst

of all of this, and it AI is recommending to it. This is like meta-leveled, like, just dog shit on dog shit. It's a situation. And then it's, and then it's disastrously expensive. Yeah. Like, what is the point?

What is the point of all of this? The point is we need to sell GPUs. And literally, in the car here, they announced a seven-year, $38 billion deal between Open AI and Amazon Web Services. It's just like why, so that they can do SORA 2 more, so they can generate more copyright infringement. 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?

I have, 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. And I knew exactly what it was. And I was lazy. And so I said, write the code. And so I put in, and then this is a joke comment, and people should do this more often, I put in, I paste it in the code, and I said, this code comes courtesy of chatGBT, if you have any issues with this software, please contact OpenAI.

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.

That's the thing. That's the whole AI bubble. But I'm not a paying subscriber anymore. Oh, that's even worse for them. Yeah, no. I just, you know, because it's, it's, the stupidest model of theirs could have come up with that code because it was so easy. You know, it was, it was

finicky, it was annoying. There are bit situations where I, I say, oh, there's a bug in this code, I pasted it in, and it looks it over in it. It saved me, in aggregate, tens of hours in the last three years. That's fine. It's like, if it was regular SaaS, I'd be like,

cool, yeah. If it was, I think that's kind of part of why I canceled the subscription, because if it was, you know, whatever, you need to value your time. You know, I could, 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.

Like a useful little bit of software we pay for and it does a thing. And it wasn't stealing from everyone and burning down. It's just, 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, 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? That actually makes me want to move to a specific. post you made, your scaling laws post. Let's talk about this. 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, 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 GPT4 came out, it does seem like tech people had a reason to be excited. I was so excited. What was exciting? It was awesome. You talked to it. And it was just like this, I would ask it coding problems that I found. So I was still a teacher at the time. 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. And I obviously read them over. 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. These are decent practice problems.

And like, this is useful software. I did not understand how expensive it was. But there was, there's a, the. the number of things that would have to happen. I will also give you, so the listeners don't get mad. To be clear, GPT4 was 2023.

Yeah. We were very early in understanding, I mean, the environmental damage was there early. Sure. But they were also promising the effects. But it took a full year until June 2024 when they,

it came out, the open AI would burn $5 billion. So like early on, we didn't really know the costs either. And if, I'm sure someone will find a fucking link. Anyway, keep going.

Well, so I was, I was pumped up because I, I saw GPT3 was, I, you know, I'm a tech person. And so I remember seeing early demos of GPT3 and it was like interesting novelty. It would say stupid things and it was kind of cool. They could even generate sentences. That was awesome. 3.5 came out and GPT, whatever.

Chat GPT is like, oh, this is pretty cool. 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? It doesn't happen very much. But I think, you know what? I'll be honest. I need that there's something, I think, mentally about me where all of the anthropomorphization pisses, not even pissed me off.

I'm just like, okay, shut up, shut up, shut up. I think it was bullied too much as a kid that, like, compliments don't work on me anymore. I do want to write a thing at some point about how if it wasn't chat GPT, if it was like box, get text. Yeah. 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. Like, it's anthropomorphization of like, oh, you're talking to a person that really makes me mad. Yes. And also, I find every time it goes, you got it. You got it. Shut up, shut up. 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 like take, we're going. We're going a couple levels.

I'll make sure the link is in the. Well, yeah, no, there's like four of them. Hopefully they're on you. But it's like a guy doing, 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. And, like, eventually you will be able to do several pull-ups.

And then at the end, it's like, you got this. Okay, if... So the plan is you do more pull-ups over time. You could probably just work that out by doing pull-ups or texting it, mate. But nobody said you got this. But, yeah, exactly. 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, that's the commercial? That's the commercial. That's the commercial. But it's, yeah. The commercial, 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. One to several. You got this. You got this. I mean, I didn't pause. I mean, I did not pause the commercial, but I, it could have said some really interesting stuff in the middle. I don't know. I also, the bullet, because it has to have a bullet of the list.

I am pretty sure and I might be lying 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 it's just Google search except it makes up the results that's all the there's three fucking years 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 that's Yahoo answers that's just Yahoo or Quora but it's like light speed yeah

the fast, well, Quora now is GPD. Okay. Because Adam DiAngelo is on the board of Open AI. So it's just got GPT answers and GPD questions now. So cool. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman,

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But early on, it was exciting, and there were these scaling laws. Walk me through the listeners who might not understand the scaling loss. So, yeah, so the post that I wrote, which I'd very nicely called eloquent, so if I could pay you $20 a month to kind of just send me stuff like, you got this or that I'm elegant. Yeah, I'll just, I'll email those. You got this. Okay, that's great. I'll put it on a schedule. Yeah, if you could just do that, I'll pay you $20 a month.

No, but so there was an idea that if you increase the size of the models, I'm not an AI. I'm not an AI scientist. 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. 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 nice jump in performance. Make model 10 times bigger, get nice jump in performance.

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 they can get. Yeah. And it did work. 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. I mean, there's a number of, they have smart people over there. Yeah.

Like, I mean, we can be honest that, like, they're doing clever stuff. Smart is also a very subjective stuff. Sure. These are people who are experts in mathematics. Yeah, they're doing hard, real math and they're getting results. Like, the fact that it can do what it does is incredible. Yeah, it's kind of crazy that they can do it, 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.

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. But like, at the moment when it was released, it was like, oh my gosh, like this is actually crazy. Yeah. 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. And Sam Altman was just like, yeah, well, we made a big model. It was the best announcement ever. I'm actually going to put it. But from what I remember, Miss Clammy Sammy was like, yeah, you know, I'm just going to do it from memory. I remember. It was like, yeah, good news. It's really good for writing.

Bad news, it's really compute intensive. And I was like, yay. And in the announcement, I did quote this in the post because I don't want to make stuff up and like, whatever. 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. But like, where's the, like, where's the big improvement? Right, 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. February some in 2020. Yeah, that was the, that was game over. Yeah. And then they did the reasoning stuff. And the reasoning stuff was not. Well, the reasoning thing was September 2024.

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? 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. It's like instead of spitting out and output, it goes, what would the output be? Oh, I will skit. I will go through it and choose these steps, which is, it's test time compute and it's meant. And I could have had a moment of reflection when the reasoning models came out where, because I was like, okay.

It was still the height of the fever, though. I know, but I, so I asked it, a hard question. So I did a math degree and a computer science degree. Right. So I was like, take this topic for. from sophomore year abstract algebra and do this like visualization of the thing. Right. And I took one of the early reasoning models,

whichever one of it was. Like 01, oh one of it. Sure. Because it's like, you have a PhD level thing in the pocket. Okay, so PhD level thing should be able to take 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. 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, and I can, 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. Like they, it looked like open AI 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. but I can get why someone who is stick within the booster ring might not immediately be like, fuck. Because, yeah, I don't know people. I didn't build things of reasoning.

And it did actually take a few months for people to work out products with reasoning. Yeah, I mean, and whatever. 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. And that's the thing, marginally. Yeah.

It's always marginally. But now it's marginally. But that's the thing. Three to four was sick. That was sick. That was not marginal. 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, I remember the jump. I wasn't doing better off loan at the time. Didn't do that into February 2024. But I remember being like, oh, that's good. But I remember just

being like, okay, now what? 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. And so I was like, oh, like, all they had to do, it. It, it, It was like, it is a freight train towards like actual really cool thing because it's like just make it bigger. And therefore, if we just need to make it bigger, then we do need more compute. 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 like that's where the freight train is over.

Yeah. And I just, 4.5 came out. Didn't really think about it that hard. They start doing the reasoning stuff 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 interesting. But then it's like another whole year goes by. And then GPT5 comes out. And like, what was that?

It was nothing. And it was so strange. And so that was the final. 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. But then I was like, this is interesting. I've started reading this guy, Ed's posts. GPD5 is coming out next week.

I wonder if this guy is going to have an extraordinary amount of egg on his face. Yeah. Because this, like, you might have been scared. I, I wasn't because I have the stone will of the Buddha, but it's,

I was also just like, when it, when reasoning was coming up, going back to 2023, they did some real shit. The rumors around that, Q Star. Yeah.

It was like, the reason Sam Alton 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. There was all of the, 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. 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. But GPT-5, I wasn't particularly worried about because it did, I could not fucking tell you what it was going to be. Like, no one really, if you go back to 20-23 and you look, up GPT, 5 stuff. The shit that people are saying is insane. There was someone saying it would be completely autonomous and it would turn weapons systems against people. There's bonkers shit. But getting up to it, yeah, it was kind of a proving point, but it was just another fucking model. Well, and so you and I started exchanging emails because whatever, I saw your podcast,

and I sent a long of my post over. And it was interesting talking to you. And then I, I, when that, when that 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, 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, the biggest thing ever, they're like, for our paid subscribers, you can turn your chat yellow. Yeah.

They still haven't released. They still haven't released that? I don't, well, I'm not a paying, I'm not a paying subscribers. I've never seen a yellow. 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. Can I change my window color? Well, the model's not going to... On GPD. Are you Google thing? No, I'm going to ask it. Because it's fucking insane if this does... Searching the web. Yes, you can change.

They did... Well, can you, though? 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. Well, if you can't ask, like, I don't know what it's... 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.

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, 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 like, give me the button.

It should have said, Ed, great question. Would you like it to be blue, yellow, pink, or charzart orange? And like, but where was the button? 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 it's the biggest moment ever and you can now make Chad GPD Brown. It's insane. It's insane.

I don't know if brown is one of the supportive colors. Probably not. Next year. Yeah. That relies on the compute, actually, the Oracle deal. Yeah. Unlocks Brown. Unlocks brown.

Oh my God. It's so cool that we've built our entire economy on top of this as well. But the GPT5 thing is, it was. it was such a weird moment because watching everyone try and be excited about it was really good there was the whole Theo White not Theo wait and that's

easy the information Theo there's this fucking guy now I'm gonna I really shouldn't have blanked I've mentioned him he did a whole thing about GPT5 I'm gonna look this up live on air this professional show where he did a whole thing saying GPT5 was the most amazing thing

ever and then walked it back and then had to be like yeah actually Yes, 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, it's like, actually it's not the same as when I used it,

which is craziest. 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. What, GPT-6? Well, yeah. It's just, but also what's that meant to the,

because GPT-5 was this weird kind of like myth in the future. It's like when we reach this, everything will get better. 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. It's like, if it's just continued marginal improvement,

what am I? Yeah. What are we doing? 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. 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 literally fine. I'm actually, like, I sound super sarcastic, but like, that's literally fine. No, but that's literally fine would be if this was a $10 billion industry. If they were selling it as, like, the equivalent of virtualization or like some side thing to the greater cloud computer infrastructure, not the entire future revenue engine. Because it isn't that at all.

No, I mean, and so, you know, I run a business. And I think that, so a thing that started people say is they say, like, you have product market fit, which is like, oh, your product is good. 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 of chat GPT got uninstalled from your phone? You would not. 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 would be very upset. If you have a, like, parisocial. I don't know, just 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. 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? 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. No. I'm just saying like if you, like you got a baby name from chat, GPT, that's.

That's tough. Yeah. That's really bad. The more, that was said to me by a booster. The more I think about it, more I'm like, brother, one day your child is going to hear this. Because all they do is they sell a book called like the baby name book. And it has like a list of names in it. I don't fucking know.

Read some books. Like just think about it. Yeah. I'm going to, one of the most important choices, the identity of a future human. I'm going to send it to incorrect Google search. Yeah. It's depressing, but it's also quite funny because I feel like this era has really reverend. field, who just doesn't know anything about fucking it?

The people who are just like will believe anything or will just believe that they are smart at something because of machine told them they are? Yeah. That they got this. You got this. 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.

Fuck, there's no other way to do that. There's no way to do that. I don't have like some kind of calendar? No, no, it's got to be a reminder. And so 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 if you like watch the ads on the NFL or whatever, it's like you are going to, 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. Right. That was AI. Right. The AI is going to categorize your transactions. Sure. Can't do it. I bought, I was at a conference and it was, you know, whatever, May 20th, May 21st, May 22nd. I go to Starbucks, I go to pizza, I go to a thing. They're all travel-related expenses.

One is travel, and then the Starbucks is client conversation. 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 this? What did they say? Well, they were just like, oh, you know, sometimes it makes mistakes. We should get on that. Fuck yeah.

Thank you. So that's my accountant. Yeah. 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. Something really, but someone's going to, someone's going to do something stupid. Yeah, well, so back to Replit. I mean, I think that they, I kind of hope that they're, I don't know if I 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 companies. There are people with jobs who, like it will involve people. Like, I don't, I wouldn't want to ask for people to get laid off who are hardworking people. And some of them are like cool scientists who have studied. hard and they're like nice people. And it's the grim part of all this is like,

people are going to lose fucking jobs. But it's, I mean, it's the executives who, you know, obviously pissed me off for just lying through their teeth, right? I mean, those people deserve to, and they're never actually going to have a bad outcome happen to them. 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? So I have a blog, blog. Blog. That Charlie Meyer. co, which is like where kind of my writings go, but I'm also trying to set up a newsletter. So that's CSmire.substack.com, and my name is spelled M-E-Y-E-R. Hell yeah. And I, of course am Ed Zittron. You can find me on the internet at Google.com.

That's where I live. I'll 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 yeah, should have a monologue coming up this week. I know I did an announcement where I said I was going 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. When I eventually talk about this, it'll be a lot of fun. Otherwise, catch you soon. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more.

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