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

In this week's Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through why AI isn’t replacing all software companies, and why the hype behind Claude Code is utterly specious. Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! 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 https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv 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: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:36Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline Monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 0:49Ed Zitron?

  So in the last few weeks, there's been a dramatic sell-off in software stocks driven by the anxiety that companies will, instead of paying for someone like Salesforce or Microsoft, simply build their own software. It is a genuinely stupid assumption based on analysts and reporters that simply do not care about the truth. In their mind, one can simply type "build me Salesforce now" into Claude code and have it barf out an identical functional clone that's compliant, secure, stable, all 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? Look, when you pay a software company, even a dogshit mediocre one a monthly fee, you're not just paying them to access the software,

• 1:31Ed Zitron?

  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 an 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? Well, you're gonna need a SOC 2 audit, and you're definitely gonna 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 gonna effectively take an engineer off of one of your Your teams, probably for good to be honest, to maintain your new internal sales force,

• 2:15Ed Zitron?

  Monday, Microsoft 365 and Notion clones, your Trello clone as well, probably your Asana one, I mean, how much software are you gonna build? Good thing you've got Claude Code to help speed that up, right? Just make sure you read everything it writes, cuz every little fuck-up just became your problem, and you've got nobody to scream at, because while your company is saving fifteen dollars per seat per month, you've also fired the people whose job it is to make sure your nasty little software subscriptions actually fucking function. And while you may fear that a boss might try and force this down your throat to save money, I must be clear how impossible this task is. Even the most annoying, frustrating software-as-a-service contract protects you from the grueling underlying maintenance and infrastructural bullshit that goes into making sure the thing

• 2:59Ed Zitron?

  you're paying for actually loads and functions wherever you load it, and even on the browser that you wanna load it in, in most cases, thank you Riverside. The people pushing this narrative are either fundamentally disconnected from how the world works, or actively incentivized to mislead you. I've seen this narrative propagated on multiple different business television shows and supposedly respectable outlets, and it makes me genuinely worried that we don't have a media industry prepared to dissect fundamentally deceptive narratives. Just because it's possible for a non-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

• 3:40Ed Zitron?

  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, please stop seeing every incremental improvement as proof of whatever marketing slop Wario Amade 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.

• 4:22Ed Zitron?

  How are we meant to trust anybody who vociferously pushed this or who got obsessed with AI once all of this falls apart? And when I say falls apart, I mean that the current rates that you are paying are not even close to being sustainable. I'm currently working on a piece called "The Haters' Guide to Anthropic" on my premium newsletter, and I found a mathematical study that found that on a $20 a month Claude subscription, you can spend over $100 of Anthropic's API tokens. And on the $200 a month, about $2,300 to $2,700. You gotta, I guess it takes money to lose money, but this is the reality of the AI bubble.

• 5:05Ed Zitron?

  Everything you were using is being subsidized. It's being subsidized by these companies in the hopes that it kind of bakes into your life, except it's not good enough to do that. The frenzied media push under Claude 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, nah, 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.

• 5:48Ed Zitron?

  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 dollars a day. Do you think they'd actually pay that? Do you think that's actually happening? Because I'm sick and fucking tired of hearing all the people rambling about Claude Code writing all the goddamn code. I'm sick and tired of it because I don't see what the endpoint 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, that 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 is functional or useful. And if you look at vibe-coded apps, they all kind of look the same.

• 6:32Ed Zitron?

  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 10,000 people. Let's say five, 10 years passes and let's take one of these, what I think are bullshit statements about how, oh, 90% of our code's 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.

• 7:17Ed Zitron?

  Or the person didn't leave, they'd just been drinking heavily and they don't really remember what they were prompting the model with. 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. And then people will say, oh, we use AI to fix them. At some point, you're just looking at a kind of a rat's nest of crap, of code written unintentionally, 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.

• 8:00Ed Zitron?

  Anyway, I think once the real costs are charged, people are going to drop this shit like a bad habit. I can't wait. And I'm going to be smug about it. I'm going to be annoying about it. Not going to lie. But I think based on the YouTube comments, you're all going to join me. Now, 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.

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• 10:39Speaker 06

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• 10:43Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.