Dumb shit on the Internet #2
[Citation Needed]
Came across this article on The Wall Street Journal: Meet the Startup That Used AI and OpenClaw to Automate Its Own Developers. This is a profoundly dumb article for a number of reasons, but I think my favorite bit is right at the very beginning:
While some techies use the buzzy AI platform OpenClaw to help book flights or summarize news...
We've been having this tech pushed on us basically non-stop for years now, and still the only use-cases journalists can come up with to shill it to the average non-programmer is "you don't have to read your own news anymore" or "maybe it books flights faster than you do? Citation needed?"
Vinay Pinnaka, co-founder and chief technology officer of Mountain View, Calif.-based JustPaid, used a combination of OpenClaw and Anthropic’s AI coding tool, Claude Code, to create a team of seven AI agents to grind out code 24/7.
Code to do what? We're never told.
The agents have built 10 major features, each of which would have taken Pinnaka’s human developers a month or more to build.
What are the features? Name one feature. (Spoiler alert: they don't.)
The rest of the article talks about how OpenClaw and Claude let you essentially automate everything a software developer would do, without going into any detail about what work is actually getting done, how high-quality the work is, how many issues get shipped to production, how secure it all is, etc. It's pure dreck that reads almost like propaganda.
It's especially frustrating because I am well aware that LLMs generally write pretty good code these days, and that's a very useful thing that they can do. But they are not, and cannot be, a replacement for real expertise, and that is what proponents are breathlessly desperate for them to be.
We do get left with this little tidbit, at least:
When Pinnaka first began experimenting with Claude Code and OpenClaw, he racked up a bill of $4,000 each week. Then, with some adjustments like using a smaller, more efficient Claude model, he decreased his budget to $10,000 to $15,000 each month.
So this guy is paying upwards of $150,000 a year to vibe-code what appears to be yet another hyper-generic "automated financial workflow" SaaS that does the same shit all the other, established automated financial workflow SaaSes do, just this time with The Power of LLMs™ on top! Silly.
I don't intend this article series to be exclusively focused on AI, but almost all the dumb shit I come across on the internet is AI-related, so it may end up being that way for awhile.