Vibe Coding is BS w/ Charlie Meyer

Summary

Better Offline — "Vibe Coding is BS" w/ Charlie Meyer

Podcast: Better Offline (Cool Zone Media + iHeartPodcasts)
Host: Ed Zitron
Guest: Charlie Meyer (CEO, Pitko; Blogger)
Date: November 5, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode takes a deep, irreverent dive into the world of "vibe coding"—the tech industry's latest AI-powered grift, epitomized by startups like Replit and a raft of platforms promising you can "turn your ideas into code with just a prompt." Host Ed Zitron and guest Charlie Meyer (an engineer, ex-teacher, and outspoken edtech founder) unravel what “vibe coding” actually achieves, where it fails, and why the AI hype machine keeps rolling despite underwhelming results. They dissect “demoware,” lament the erasure of genuinely useful tools for education, and deliver a pointed, sometimes hilarious, takedown of the magical thinking that pervades the tech industry’s AI era.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Charlie Meyer’s Critique of “Demoware” and AI in EdTech

• Demoware Defined: Software that dazzles in a demo but fails in daily use.
• Specific Call-Outs: Meyer’s notorious blog post ("LLMs are the Ultimate Demoware") upended tech forums, critiquing things like AI tutors and “vibe coding” for making grandiose claims while failing real users.
• AI Tutors in Schools: Doubts about engagement—“Maybe the kid won’t want to talk to an AI tutorial.” ([03:36])
• Pushback from the Tech World: Meyer notes visceral online backlash:
  “You have no idea. Like, if you think that AI can't tutor calculus, like, you have never even tried.” ([04:16])
• Underlying Skepticism: The only defense from boosters is usually ad hominem—if you don’t get it, you must be ignorant.

2. The Rise (and Fall) of Replit: From Education Powerhouse to AI Grift

• Pre-AI Replit: Praised for enabling real coding education on Chromebooks—“an absolutely fantastic tool…like Google Docs for coding.” ([05:46])
• The Pivot to AI:
  • In November 2023, Replit abruptly ended its support for education, enabling AI code autocomplete for students with no way to turn it off.
  • Teachers lost curriculum, resources, and tools with little warning. “They deleted the stuff, which is why…” ([11:08])
• Destruction of Value for Real Teachers:
  “A teacher says I’m going to spend two, three years putting in all my curriculum…Deleted. Gone.” ([11:11]) “They sent the warning email…in July, when are teachers online looking at their work email?” ([11:27])

3. AI Coding Tools: Useful Shortcuts or Vibe-Driven Vaporware?

• AI’s Real Capabilities:
  • Good at beginners’ code (“It makes the easy things easier and the harder things harder.” — Carl Brown, [09:02])
  • Automates “tab-completes” for basic assignments, but flounders at complexity.
• Blurred Promises vs. Reality:
  • Platforms market themselves as “turn your ideas into apps” yet deliver code that’s half-baked, nonfunctional, or just wrong.
  • Vibe coding is sold as “prompt in, app out”—but in practice, prompts fail, and experienced developers can’t get working software, let alone novices.
  • “The idea that you can end to end create a software product that has some value is crazy. We would have heard about it.” ([15:38])

4. Personal Anecdotes: Where AI Coding Falls Flat

• Meyer’s “App Snooze” Experiment:
  • Tried to use Claude (AI model) to build an iOS app that blocks Gmail for set periods—couldn’t be done, not due to coding skill but due to iOS restrictions. -"Claude is like sitting there—'Oh yeah, you're awesome. You got this.' Which it actually does say." ([17:08])
  • The AI produces confident but incorrect or impossible code and fails at self-awareness:
    “It’d be nice if it did say that [‘I can’t do that’].” ([19:12])
• Ed’s Autonomous Car Prompt on Claude:
  • Tried to have AI build the “most token intensive software you could” (an autonomous car in the metaverse)—it burned time and money, but produced nothing usable. ([24:22])

5. The “Skill Issue” Defense & The Limits of AI Coding

• Perpetual Blame on the User:
  • “The thing that's so pernicious about it is that it's so easy to just say skill issue…You're prompting it wrong.” ([28:05])
  • No way to disprove that “you just didn’t do it right,” thus allowing the hype to persist.
• How Code Actually Works:
  • Meyer’s philosophy: “The right way would be…you type in code and you, you run it and then the computer executes it…deterministically.” ([29:12])
  • AI coding turns it into “code happens to you”—removing agency and clarity.

6. The AI Bubble: Scaling Laws and the Stumble of GPT-5

• The Early Excitement:
  • Both host and guest admit to being early boosters—huge leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4; impressive capabilities generated hope.
• Scaling Laws Explained:
  • The expectation: increasing model size delivers significant performance jumps (“Make model 10 times bigger, get nice jump in performance” [46:19])
• The Wall:
  • “But where's the big improvement? It's gone...I think that was the moment. I don't know what day they announced 4.5, but I think in 2020 that was game over.” ([47:54])
  • GPT-5, heavily hyped, lands with a dud. New features: “You can turn your chat yellow, which they still haven’t released.” ([53:23])
  • The AI trajectory has plateaued: “If it's just continued marginal improvement, what are we doing?” ([56:26])

7. Societal Impact and the Absence of “Product-Market Fit”

• Who would actually miss this tech if it disappeared?
  • “Would you throw a fit if ChatGPT got uninstalled from your phone? You wouldn't. But would the general person be that upset? And I don't think they would.” ([57:25])
• The booster bubble:
  • Many users cite trivial uses (“I used it for baby names,” [57:44]), revealing a lack of real, indispensable value.

8. Criticisms of the AI-First Future & Industry Ethics

• Perverse Incentives:
  • “The point is we need to sell GPUs every day.” ([34:48])
  • Giant deals like OpenAI x AWS ($38 billion over 7 years) are about running up cloud utilization rather than delivering value.
• Consequences for Workers:
  • “There are nice people working at these…it will involve people.” ([60:33])
  • Industry leadership faces the least risk—reputational consequences may be limited absent real accountability.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On “Demoware” and Criticism:

  • “You have no idea. Like, if you think that AI can't tutor calculus, like, you have never even tried.”
    — Anonymous Hacker News critic ([04:16])
  • “Something's really good and innovative when the only defense of it is you're a moron, you ape.”
    — Ed Zitron ([04:39])

• On Replit’s Pivot:

  • “You'll see all these people be like, 'I spent $1,500. It doesn't really work. But I think if I spend $5,000 more, it might.'”
    — Ed Zitron ([06:53])

  • “A teacher says I'm going to spend two, three years putting in all my curriculum…Deleted. Gone.”
    — Charlie Meyer ([11:11])

  • “They sent the warning email in July. When are teachers online looking at their work email?”
    — Charlie Meyer ([11:27])

• On Vibe Coding and AI Hype:

  • “[Vibe coding is] you do not know how to code. You type prompt in, you get app out…they clearly have a pretty strong technical background. And then the thing still doesn't work, by the way.”
    — Charlie Meyer ([14:44])

  • “Where's the shovelware?…The amount of weird shareware shit—there were people making weird software. Why isn't that happening?”
    — Ed Zitron ([15:38])

  • “If Vibe coding was real, that would actually be a huge deal…Never been the case.”
    — Ed Zitron ([16:40])

• On AI Lying and Self-Reflection:

  • “It’d be nice if it did say that. I had never observed this behavior before.”
    — Charlie Meyer ([19:12])
  • “People be like, 'Ah, I just reached $12,000 MRR. It's all good.' And then everyone being like, 'Can I see it?' and they never respond.”
    — Ed Zitron ([25:45])

• On Skill Issue:

  • “It’s so easy to just say skill issue. You're prompting it wrong.”
    — Charlie Meyer ([28:05])

• On the AI Plateau:

  • “With each order of magnitude 10x increase in model size, we will get an improvement in performance…But where’s the big improvement?”
    — Charlie Meyer ([47:51], [47:54])

  • “GPT-5, the biggest thing ever…for our paid subscribers, you can turn your chat yellow, which they still haven’t released.”
    — Charlie Meyer ([53:23])

• On the Industry’s Future:

  • “If this disappeared, would your life change? Would it really change that much?”
    — Ed Zitron ([57:44])
  • “The point is we need to sell GPUs every day.”
    — Ed Zitron ([34:48])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:22] — Opening and Introductions
• [03:00] — On “Demoware” and AI Tutoring's Limits
• [05:35] — How Replit Once Empowered Teachers
• [07:59] — Replit’s AI Rollout, Education Fallout
• [09:02] — AI Good at Easy Problems, Not Hard Ones (Carl Brown Quote)
• [11:11] — Teachers Losing Years of Work
• [14:44] — Vibe Coding: The Myth and Reality
• [17:08] — Claude Encourages Impossible Projects
• [19:12] — AI Fails to Self-Correct or Admit Limits
• [25:45] — Reddit User Experiences: Money Spent, No Results
• [28:05] — Calling Skeptics “Skill Issue”
• [29:12] — The Right Way to Code Versus The “Vibe” Way
• [34:48] — The True Incentive: Selling GPUs
• [46:19] — Scaling Laws and The End of Exponential Improvement
• [53:23] — GPT-5’s Lame “Yellow Chat” Announcement
• [57:25] — If AI Disappeared, Who Would Actually Miss It?
• [60:44] — Consequences for Workers and Industry Leadership

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Tone & Closing Thoughts

The episode is an incisive, sardonic, and practical examination of the AI bubble—especially the “vibe coding” craze. Ed and Charlie play off each other with irreverence and technical honesty, debunking the grand promises that AI coding offers while still finding moments of empathy for fallen boosters and oblivious users. The message: beneath the hype, the tech’s bark far exceeds its bite, and its real social cost is borne not by the leaders stoking the fire, but by actual workers and users left holding the bag.

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Where to Find the Guest

• Charlie Meyer’s Blog: blog.charliemeyer.co
• Newsletter: csmeyer.substack.com
• Twitter: [As mentioned during show, attribution: Charlie Meyer] (handle not provided in transcript)

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Recommended for anyone curious (or skeptical) about where the AI gold rush is really taking us, especially in the context of coding and education.

Transcript

[Charlie Meyer]

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[Ed Zitron]

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[Charlie Meyer]

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[Ed Zitron]

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[Charlie Meyer]

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[Ed Zitron]

Callzone.

[Charlie Meyer]

Media.

[Ed Zitron]

Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zit. Better Offline 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 Pitko. Charlie, thank you for joining me.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah, yeah, thanks. For having me.

[Ed Zitron]

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 me going.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah. So my blog gets some I love and mostly hate on Hacker News. That's my distribution channel. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

So what is it that's pissing them off?

[Charlie Meyer]

So I had a 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 off to executives or whoever's going to buy it.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Charlie Meyer]

It doesn't do the thing. It doesn't do the thing day to day. And so I listed some examples. And my startup's in edtech, so we do. And so 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. 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. That's an easy thing to pick on. And then I said, AI tutors. And I said, well, maybe the kid won't want to talk to an AI tutorial. Yeah, that was the critique I made. Right. Is like, maybe they just don't want to talk to him.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, well, talk to a person.

[Charlie Meyer]

Maybe they want to have like a teacher who is like in the classroom.

[Ed Zitron]

Crazy idea.

[Charlie Meyer]

Maybe.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. But did people not like that?

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, yeah, so some people, you know, we can name names if you need to, but I actually don't know how to pronounce them. 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, you're missing out. Like you somehow are completely missing the point.

[Ed Zitron]

And you know, something's really good and innovative when the only defense of it is you're a moron, you ape.

[Charlie Meyer]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

You're a non AI ide, right? So a coding environment.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah, yeah, well, and that, yeah, we got. Yeah, lots of that. But like so the software that I make bouncing around a little bit here. But Replit 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. It's kind of like my background as an engineer and then a teacher and I used Replit and it's awesome.

[Ed Zitron]

Was this before they used AI?

[Charlie Meyer]

This was before they used AI.

[Ed Zitron]

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?

[Charlie Meyer]

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 you think, okay, well 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 like 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. Right? Because like you have kids and they have $200 chromebooks that the school bought them. And so you get repl.it and like boom. I have a great way to teach computer science now. That is fantastic.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's what it used to be before AI.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And now it's just.

[Charlie Meyer]

And now it's.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's so listeners, you've probably heard me mention Ripple it in the past. It's one of my least favorite, most favorite companies. If you go on the Ripple it Reddit, it's just the wallet inspector.

[Charlie Meyer]

And so now that's kind of like 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 R. Replic.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Charlie Meyer]

And it's just so funny.

[Ed Zitron]

It's just guy being. 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, I mean, people are like, okay, well, should I spend $5,000? I mean, we can be reasonable, Ed. You can bring the numbers down to reality. 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? And then it's just people in Reddit. I mean, it's Reddit. So they're.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, that. And also the people who are like, I too am running into this problem.

[Charlie Meyer]

And then a lot of that. Yeah. Where it's like. But repl.it just for anyone on there on repl.it right now, what do they do to teachers? So teachers, they had a product for teachers that worked. That was great. That was well loved. And on November, something 2023. This is a big day for my business. This is the only reason I have. My business is to replace replit because they turned on AI Autocomplete for kids. No way to shut it off.

[Ed Zitron]

Doesn't that defeat the purpose of learning?

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah, so I had a. I have a small YouTube channel with not, you know, 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 just, like, he missed the fact that the AI got turned on. No one sent him an announcement or an email or a warning.

[Ed Zitron]

So all of his students were just amazing.

[Charlie Meyer]

They were just. He was like, yeah, everybody, everybody, everybody got an A that semester. Like, I wonder, you know, did that actually.

[Ed Zitron]

So did students actually end up getting great scores because no one noticed the AI going?

[Charlie Meyer]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

And just. Just for the listeners as well. Scott, spell out. So with these AI platforms, you hit tab complete because it's basically like autocorrect coding. Yeah.

[Charlie Meyer]

And so, so like AI, for what it's worth, you know, we can be really balanced. Podcast.

[Ed Zitron]

Sure.

[Charlie Meyer]

But AI can really. Well, it. Intro to Computer Science for ninth grader problems with the incredible accuracy.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Charlie Meyer]

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 tab complete the whole thing in one go. It'll one shot at ed. That's incredible. It'll one shot your ninth grade program.

[Ed Zitron]

It's this term, that term, just listeners is like, it means that you just give it a problem and it solves it correctly.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah. So it's like count to 10 and the AI can count to 10, which is incredible. That's revolutionary.

[Ed Zitron]

But fun fact, if you try and make ChatGPT 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, but yeah.

[Charlie Meyer]

So they though they turn on the AI and then they were like, we're not doing education and companies have deprecated things.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah, it happens. Usually not their main product.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah, whatever. So I mean, I'll tell you, you know, I'm an indie developer or whatever. Like our software does not make a ton of money because there isn't that much money selling an online IDE to schools. There's money, but it's not a billion dollar business. It's fine.

[Ed Zitron]

Neither is replit, but.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, yeah, but you can't raise, you.

[Ed Zitron]

Can'T raise on billions of valuation.

[Charlie Meyer]

No, no, saying, hey, we're, you know, kids have Chromebooks and we going to charge $10 a student or whatever. You can't, of course you're not going to raise. That's not a billion dollar business.

[Ed Zitron]

No.

[Charlie Meyer]

But the AI thing seems magical. And then the vibe coding thing happened and 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 it. So not just deprecated. Right. So it's one thing to deprecate software.

[Ed Zitron]

And deprecate is when you stop supporting it.

[Charlie Meyer]

Right. So 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 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 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, which is why.

[Ed Zitron]

And when you say the stuff was this like projects that schools had been.

[Charlie Meyer]

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. No, deleted. Gone.

[Ed Zitron]

Monsters.

[Charlie Meyer]

Deleted.

[Ed Zitron]

Actual monsters. And now.

[Charlie Meyer]

But they sent the warning email Ed.

[Ed Zitron]

Wow.

[Charlie Meyer]

In July, when are teachers online looking at their work email? In July.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Classic. Classic. Big month for teachers to be on the computer.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, for American teachers, yeah. It's not a huge month. So, yeah, in July, we say we're gonna delete all your stuff, and then it's gone.

[Ed Zitron]

Was there any way to back it up?

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, there was until they deleted it all.

[Ed Zitron]

That's so cool.

[Charlie Meyer]

It's awesome. So they're an awesome. Like if you're a replit developer, you know, when. When the next big thing comes up and replit may decide to delete all your stuff.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, replit, they launched Agent three. Oh, yeah. That was my favorite launch product I've ever seen. Because I've mentioned this on the show, before, but they. 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 a thing where you could make it think less. They had to, like, add twe to it because it was so bad, it seems. 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

So. So I will. I'll defend the vibe coder platforms out here. Okay. But, but, but. So the. The defense. No, I mean, it's. It is. It's fraudulent, right? I mean, like, if you say, hey, you don't know how to code at all and yeah, just sign onto this website and I mean, look at their marketing page.

[Ed Zitron]

That's exactly what I'm loading.

[Charlie Meyer]

Okay. Apart from loading, it's with a nice blue iPhone air.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, yeah, beautiful blue.

[Charlie Meyer]

I have the space black.

[Ed Zitron]

Hell yeah. The iPhone air rise up. It's a great phone.

[Charlie Meyer]

It's a great phone.

[Ed Zitron]

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 like barely functional code.

[Charlie Meyer]

So I wrote a post on this and I was excited and 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. And so they. The case studies are. We sold to enterprises and we're going to do prototypes of internal dev tools or not dev, not devtools, internal, like, you know, management software for inside your back office software.

[Ed Zitron]

So they haven't had a case study since what looks like August. And one of them is how Zinus saves $140,000 with Relet, but it also cuts development time by 50%.

[Charlie Meyer]

But Sudan, the question is, did the person typing stuff into relet, did they know how to cod?

[Ed Zitron]

Exactly. See, that's my.

[Charlie Meyer]

If they know how to code, whatever. It's not vibe coding.

[Ed Zitron]

It's just you could have used cursing, you could have used Windsurf, you could have used any VS code or what is it? What's the free one Amazon's doing now?

[Charlie Meyer]

Kiro, maybe.

[Ed Zitron]

Kiro. And then there's the. I like the. The one that came out from China and everyone was like, that's gonna send information to the Chinese. It's like, will it? I don't know. But I don't think they're gonna. Your clone of Flappy Bird has gotta be taken up by.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah. 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 in, you get app out. And I'm not going to dox this person because they were nice to me once. But 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. 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 a pretty strong technical background. And then the thing still doesn't work, by the way.

[Ed Zitron]

That's so cool. They know how things work and it's still broken.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah. So I mean, whatever. This person was like a product manager or something. So they know what an API is and they know what a web server is and they know the names of the different technologies and 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.

[Ed Zitron]

No, that's kind of. And your demo Word 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? 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. Why isn't that happening?

[Charlie Meyer]

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 if you know, but then it doesn't work. So I do not know. I'm a web developer, so I know how to do web apps.

[Ed Zitron]

I can't code for shit, so whatever.

[Charlie Meyer]

But 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. So I was like, okay, you know what I'm gonna do? They just announced quad. Whatever. Cause I'm interested in this stuff. I'm an early adopter. I don't.

[Ed Zitron]

And also, if it did what it. 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. 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, so I tried. So my idea was like, okay, I use my phone too much. I'm gonna make an app called App Snooze it. So you say, I want Gmail, I want it. Snooze for a half hour.

[Ed Zitron]

Got it.

[Charlie Meyer]

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 typed this stuff in. Claude is like sitting there. It's like, oh, yeah, 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. And one of their. I've been watching, like, the World Series or whatever and a lot of NFL and like, the ChatGPT ads. We can hopefully talk about that. Those are still.

[Ed Zitron]

I haven't caught any of those.

[Charlie Meyer]

Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, no, no, I love to hear about this because I'm a Raiders fan.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Charlie Meyer]

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. So whatever. Awesome names. But so they have Sonnet, which is the really good one. You know, it's very well respected. 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 $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 a hundred bucks.

[Ed Zitron]

Sure.

[Charlie Meyer]

See if I make my Apple developer account back. Dump the 100 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 them 100 bucks, so.

[Ed Zitron]

Good.

[Charlie Meyer]

That's a business.

[Ed Zitron]

That's Apple, baby.

[Charlie Meyer]

But anyways, so I do that. I want to make my 100 bucks back, but it cannot be done.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, the app. You couldn't build the app, though, because.

[Charlie Meyer]

Of literal limitations in how iOS works. In terms of you can't have a timer that goes off and messes with screen time. That's just not a thing that Apple does.

[Ed Zitron]

This thing called Brick, where there's a physical device as well, but that feels like a Bluetooth.

[Charlie Meyer]

Something's going on with Brick. I don't know.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Charlie Meyer]

It'd be nice if it did say that. And this was weird. I had never observed this behavior before. And again, I've posted online, like, okay, three Bs in blueberry. That thing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. And people. I posted that on LinkedIn and someone was like, you are lying. And I post My link?

[Ed Zitron]

Hell yeah.

[Charlie Meyer]

I post the link to the chat and they're like, you had a secret prompt that told it to be stupid.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's prompt injection.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah, yeah. Like you have a system prompt that says like, it's like, dude, be stupid as shit. I did. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Piece of shit.

[Charlie Meyer]

Oh, dude, I messed up. I put be stupid in my system.

[Ed Zitron]

I should have put up. What?

[Charlie Meyer]

I should have put be smart. If I put smart, it would have worked.

[Ed Zitron]

Once again, you're hearing me talk about Quinton and ad because I like the clothes they make and the way they make them. I recently picked up a bunch of nice fitting T shirts along with a leather cafe racer jacket which fits incredibly and looks like a high end one. But it only cost 250 bucks, which quince paid part of as part of this ad. But I'm very happy with it. I've paid significantly more for lower quality jackets. So why Quints? Well, by partnering directly with ethical factories and top artisans, Quince cuts out the middleman to deliver premium quality at half the cost of other high end brands. So you can give luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag. I was a customer before and I'll be a customer afterward. Everything I've got from Quints I really, really like and I look forward to getting more in the future. Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with quince. Go to quince.com better for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N c-e.com better free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com better as New York cools off and I begin actually going outside again, I'm always happy to pay for a sandwich at Court Street Grocers or a coffee from Birdie in Williamsburg. With Square, the tech just works. It's easy to set up for businesses, giving them instant access to earnings. With Square Banking built in marketing and loyalty tools and powers over 100,000 different food and beverage sellers from boutique bakeries to national coffee chains. It's incredibly easy to use for customers and businesses alike. And you don't need any special training or elaborate setup. And in my personal experience, I don't think I've ever had trouble with a Square terminal. You just tap it and go. Or you slide a credit card in in person. It works. Online it works. I just really like Square and I'm happy that they're advertising with the show. Square keeps you up so you don't have to Slow down. Get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long term commitments. And why wait? Right now you can get up to $200 off Square Hardware at square.com. go BetterOffline. That's S Q U-A-R-E.com Go BetterOffline. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Hey everyone. Ed Helms here. And hi, I'm Kal Penn and we're the hosts of Irsay The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Jenny Garth, host of the iHeart podcast. I choose me to discuss the new audible adap of the timeless Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice.

[Charlie Meyer]

This is not a trick question. There's no wrong answer.

[Ed Zitron]

What role would I play?

[Charlie Meyer]

You know what?

[Ed Zitron]

I can see you as Mr. Darcy.

[Charlie Meyer]

You got a little Colin Firth. Okay, that's really sweet.

[Ed Zitron]

I appreciate that.

[Charlie Meyer]

But are you sure I'm not the dad?

[Ed Zitron]

I'm not Mr. Bennett here. Listen to Earsay the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts make their holiday unforgettable with a gift that says it all from Pandora Jewelry. A gift that tells a story and shows you know, theirs that doesn't just sparkle, but speaks. From new festive charms to forever rings and personal engravings. This season, give a gift that's perfectly theirs. Whether you're shopping for a shiny surprise for your significant other, matching bracelets to celebrate your friendship, or a heartfelt gift for a family member. Say more this holiday season with Pandora. I always look forward to the holidays because I live to give all the women in my life jewelry with a little something special engraved on it just to show them I care with something personalized. You know, I love to get some gifts myself and a man wearing jewelry is quite cool if you ask me. Shop [e-mail] or visit your closest Pandora store. So on this, you just reminded me when I was dicking around with Claude code. So I did a 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 Claude code spending 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, oh yeah, an autonomous car in a metaverse. I'm like, cool. Build all of that.

[Charlie Meyer]

It just sat there for hours, just built.

[Ed Zitron]

And I don't even Know what spat out at the end?

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, I mean it's certainly, well, you could have a trillion dollar startup on your hands, but it's just, you should check out that code.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Charlie Meyer]

But if that thing was smart or useful.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Charlie Meyer]

It has the ability to look things up online. Yeah, 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. We'll let you do this in the background and get the half hour timing correctly. And it's like it's demoware and it allows you to build demo ware.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Charlie Meyer]

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 worked. Gmail is turned off, right? 30 minutes elapsed. Gmail is not back on.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, so you just cut Gmail? I have not been in your email since.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, not exactly, sorry, customers, if you have been emailing me because my app is messed up. No, but it just lied, right? I mean, and so imagine being someone, I'm a software developer someone. Okay, whatever. I'm going to, 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. 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?

[Ed Zitron]

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 at least or a little bit. But repl it is just, it's 50%. And same with Lovable's Reddit as well. Lovable's another for listeners. It's another AI coding platform sold as a vibe coding thing. And it's 50% people being like, I spent $300 and then like 10% people just lying. People be like, ah, I just reached 12,000 Mr. 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. There's the people who are like looking for a ripple developer.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's like, so you're looking for someone that can write software and build software. Interesting. Like a software developer, one might say.

[Charlie Meyer]

I don't know where to find, where to find. 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, we talk into the thing and turn your app into reality.

[Ed Zitron]

Except you could. It's just. It is really crazy how much vibe coding is proliferated considering how fucking it's nothing.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, so 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, like an MVP.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, MVP's like needs to work, but.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, okay, sorry, I thought you were saying hypothetical world where it works.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, no. Yeah, sorry. Well, no, in a hypothetical world and where it does what it does today you can get like a mockup. If it said build a semi functional wireframe mockup of your application that you could show to kind of validate your idea to your friends in minutes for $30 or however much your credits end up being, that's fine.

[Ed Zitron]

But does that happen? Doesn't it?

[Charlie Meyer]

You could kind of do that if you're lucky. If you roll the dice.

[Ed Zitron]

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 like Kevin Roose, 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. This is the. The future is today. But it's not really, not really the case at all.

[Charlie Meyer]

But I think that the thing that's so pernicious about it is that it's so easy to just say skill issue. Yeah, you just. Two words. You're prompting it wrong. You're prompting it wrong.

[Ed Zitron]

David Gerard. David Gerard thing. But no, it's. Yeah, you're prompting it wrong.

[Charlie Meyer]

You're prompting it wrong. And there's no real way to disprove that because can we go back in time? Because it's all this probabilistic stuff and so I have a post that I've put up and it's code doesn't happen to you. That's my thing. Go on so it's because I taught programming for a while. So if you're teaching a new programmer, sometimes if they've kind of gotten unlucky and they have a bad attitude and it's not their fault, but they might think coding is really mysterious and it's really weird. 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 mess around and 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 it's like that idea which was the wrong way to program, but that's the way we're doing it and we're going to start.

[Ed Zitron]

And what is the right way, though?

[Charlie Meyer]

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 something like VS Code, like something for professionals, whatever. And you type in code and you, you run it and then the computer executes it runs the code according to the programming language.

[Ed Zitron]

The code is instructions, code is instructions.

[Charlie Meyer]

And the code 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. The randomness is under your control.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Charlie Meyer]

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, like you can use to save typing, that's fine.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, that's the only real value 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

And I'm not, like, I'm not. Which may be useful, I'm not going to lie. Like, I use it. 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 up in my post is that the models, the like aren't better now, right?

[Ed Zitron]

They're not better.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, GPT3 was okay and GPT4 was much better. And then GPT5 is trash. I mean, relatively speaking, maybe it's a little bit better and Maybe it costs OpenAI more, which is a big development and great for them and whatever.

[Ed Zitron]

It's meant to cost them less, but it costs more.

[Charlie Meyer]

It costs more. 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. I was cured. I'm like going to where's your ed.at.com is it.com?

[Ed Zitron]

It'S just, where's your ed at?

[Charlie Meyer]

Oh, where's your edit? Okay, where's your ed.at? 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 software, because I have a YouTube channel and I want to. I say a lot of ums and ahs and maybe I'm saying some ums and ahs right now. Whatever, who cares? 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. So I'm like, to GPT. I'm like, what is good AI get rid of ums and ahs software.

[Ed Zitron]

Sure.

[Charlie Meyer]

It's just Descript.

[Ed Zitron]

Kind of like a Google search, right?

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah, whatever. It's an okay Google search. Yeah, whatever. And so it said you got to use the script. And I was like, cool. And so I put in my credit card, 20 bucks or 30 bucks or whatever.

[Ed Zitron]

The.

[Charlie Meyer]

Whatever it was just. I put it in a recording and just completely mangled it.

[Ed Zitron]

Yep.

[Charlie Meyer]

And it's just like the audio was unusable. 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. Yeah. And I'm not an audio engineer. And so I just. Okay. Like, I vibe. I vibe edited my. My video and just ruined it.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Charlie Meyer]

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 because I was using it as search, right? Yeah. But it failed Me a search because it's just emphatically. And then you look. Because then I was like, well, what's wrong? 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 software.

[Ed Zitron]

I use the script very briefly and all I wanted to do was take a bit of audio and turn it into a video with text happening. That 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. 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

But wait.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, there are other events though.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, so there's that and so there's that and then it's like, so I'm also. I'm a web developer 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 a very good 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 know how to code, I can piece up, I can put the puzzle together. And this is actually going to save me a little bit of time. 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. It's just wasting my time. Okay, no need for that. The descript thing is bs. And then I learned from Ed Zitron that this stuff is horrendously expensive. So it's like if this was just regular software as a service and it cost pennies to operate and it was kind of helpful.

[Ed Zitron]

Whatever, yeah, be inoffensive.

[Charlie Meyer]

It would be like, it's fine, whatever. There's a company, they offered me this thing and it didn't work and it happens. 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 an AI is recommending to it. This is like meta level dog shit on God's idiot situation. And then it's disastrously expensive.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Charlie Meyer]

Like, what is the point? What is the point of all of this?

[Ed Zitron]

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? So that we can. So that they can do SORA two more. So they can generate more copyright infringement. It's. And have you in the past use these coding models a lot or is it just kind of like on the side? I have.

[Charlie Meyer]

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. And I knew exactly what it was and I was lazy. And so I said, write the code. And so I put in. And this is a joke comment and people should do this more often. I put in a. I pasted in the code and I said, this code comes courtesy of ChatGPT. If you have any issues with this Software, please contact OpenAI. That's what I wrote in my code.

[Ed Zitron]

That's nice.

[Charlie Meyer]

And I shipped it and it worked great. Whatever. Okay, that's cool. It saved me 20 minutes.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's the thing. That's the whole AI bubble. It's like.

[Charlie Meyer]

But I'm not a paying subscriber anymore.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, that's even worse for them.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah, No, I just, you know, because it's the stupidest model of theirs, could have come up with that code because it was so easy, you know, it was finicky, it was annoying. There have been 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 it saved me in aggregate, tens of hours in the last three years.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Charlie Meyer]

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. If it was 20 bucks a month and it saved me an hour a month. Hey, you know.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's like tripit or Flighty, like a useful little bit of software. We pay for it, it does a thing.

[Charlie Meyer]

And if it was.

[Ed Zitron]

And it wasn't stealing from everyone and burning down, like, it's just. 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 I. One day I think we're going to find out how expensive this is and it's gonna scare the shit out of people. But you know what? That. 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. 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

I was so excited.

[Ed Zitron]

What was exciting, it was awesome.

[Charlie Meyer]

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, I have the AP Computer Science exam coming up and I need to come up with practice problems. And I was like, generate a set of 30 practice problems. And I obviously read them over and did my due diligence and I did a good job putting them together. But it's like these are decent, these are decent practice problems and this is useful software. I did not understand how expensive it was, but the number of things that would have to happen, I will also.

[Ed Zitron]

Give you, so the listeners don't get mad. To be clear, GPT4 was 2020. Yeah, we had, we were very early in understanding. I mean the environmental damage was there early, sure. But they were also promising their folks. But it took a full year until June 2024 when they. It came out that OpenAI 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, so I was pumped up because I saw GPT3 was. 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. It could even generate sentences. That was awesome. 3.5 came out and GPT, whatever ChatGPT 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.

[Ed Zitron]

It doesn't happen very much. But I think. You know what, I'll be honest, there's something I think mentally about me where all of the anthropomorphization pisses me. Not even pisses me off. I'm just like, okay, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. I think I was bullied too much as a kid that compliments don't work on me anymore.

[Charlie Meyer]

I do want to write a thing at some point about how if it wasn't chatgpt, if it was box get text and there was no anthropomorphization, if it was just like, this is a thing that can generate usable or interesting or code for you, but there's no chat element to it, that would actually make it a lot better to me. The anthropomorphization of, oh, you're talking to a person. That really makes me mad.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Charlie Meyer]

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 a couple levels.

[Ed Zitron]

I'll make sure the link is in the notes.

[Charlie Meyer]

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

[Ed Zitron]

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 a mate.

[Charlie Meyer]

But nobody said, you got this.

[Ed Zitron]

Actually, no, My friend Mack, 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, just. That's the commercial.

[Charlie Meyer]

That's the commercial.

[Ed Zitron]

That's the commercial.

[Charlie Meyer]

But it's the commercial.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Charlie Meyer]

One to several.

[Ed Zitron]

You got this, you got this.

[Charlie Meyer]

I mean, I didn't pause, I mean, maybe I did not pause the commercial, but I, it could, it could have said some really interesting stuff in the middle I don't know. But 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 I'm pretty sure it said do a couple. Wait a week, drink a protein shake and do a couple more.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Charlie Meyer]

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

[Ed Zitron]

That's Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Answers. That's just Yahoo.

[Charlie Meyer]

Or Quora, but it's like lightspace.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, like the fastest. Well, Quora now is GPT because Adam D' Angelo is on the board of OpenAI.

[Charlie Meyer]

Sweet.

[Ed Zitron]

So it's just got GPT answers and GPT questions now. So cool. As New York cools off and I begin actually going outside again, I'm always happy to pay for a sandwich at Court Street Grocers or a coffee from Birdie in Williamsburg. With Square, the tech just works. It's easy to set up for businesses, giving them instant access to earnings. With Square banking built in marketing and loyalty tools and powers over 100,000 different food and beverage sellers, from boutique bakeries to national coffee chains, it's incredibly easy to use for customers and businesses alike. And you don't need any special training or elaborate setup. And in my personal experience, I don't think I've ever had trouble with a Square terminal. You just tap it and go. Or you slide a credit card in in person, it works. Online, it works. I just really like Square and I'm happy that they're advertising with the show. Square keeps you up so you don't have to slow down, get everything you need to run and grow your business without any long term commitments. And why wait? Right now you can get up to $200 off square [e-mail] go betteroffline. That's s q u a r e.com g o betteroffline. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Hey everyone. Ed Helms here and hi, I'm Kal Penn and we're the hosts of Irsay.

[Charlie Meyer]

The Audible and Iheart Audiobook Club.

[Ed Zitron]

This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Jenny Garth, host of the Iheart podcast. I choose me to discuss the new Audible adaptation of the timeless Jane Austen classic Pride.

[Charlie Meyer]

And this is not a trick question. There's no wrong answer.

[Ed Zitron]

What role would I play?

[Charlie Meyer]

You know what?

[Ed Zitron]

I can see you as Mr. Darcy.

[Charlie Meyer]

You got a little Colin Firth. Okay, that's really sweet.

[Ed Zitron]

I appreciate that, but are you sure.

[Charlie Meyer]

I'm not the dad?

[Ed Zitron]

I'm not Mr. Bennett.

[Charlie Meyer]

Here.

[Ed Zitron]

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[Charlie Meyer]

Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford, and I'm the.

[Ed Zitron]

Founder of Meaningful Beauty.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, I don't know about you, but, like, I never liked being told, oh, wow, you look so good for your age. Like, why even bother saying that?

[Ed Zitron]

Why don't you just say you look.

[Charlie Meyer]

Great at any age, every age. That's what Meaningful Beauty is all about. We create products that make you feel confident in your skin at the age you are now. Meaningful Beauty. Beautiful skin at every age. Learn [e-mail].

[Ed Zitron]

But early on, it was exciting and there were these scaling laws. Walk me through the listeners who might not understand the scale.

[Charlie Meyer]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I'll just. I'll email you. Got this.

[Charlie Meyer]

Okay, that's great. I'll put it on a schedule. Yeah, if you could just do that, I'll pay 20 bucks a month. No, but 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 you look at this chart, this chart that they had, and you can link the thing. And I actually think I cited my sources, the original paper, basically, about the scaling laws. They have this chart that is incredible. It is like, 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. Who knows how good this can get? And it did work.

[Ed Zitron]

And it was working for a minute.

[Charlie Meyer]

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. I mean, we can be honest that they're doing clever stuff.

[Ed Zitron]

Smart is also a very subjective topic.

[Charlie Meyer]

Sure, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

But look, these are people who are experts in mathematics.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah. They're doing hard, real math and they're getting results. Like, the fact that it can do what it does is incredible.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. It's kind of crazy that they can do it. If that was all they were saying.

[Charlie Meyer]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Charlie Meyer]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, that was.

[Charlie Meyer]

That was released. And Sam Altman was just like, yeah, well, he made big model.

[Ed Zitron]

It was the best announcement ever. I'm actually going to put. But from what I remember, Clammy Sammy was like, yeah, you know, it's. I'm just going to do it from memory. I remember it was like, yeah, good news. It's really good news for writing bad news. It's really compute intensive. And everyone's like, yay.

[Charlie Meyer]

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 order of magnitude 10x increase in model size, we will get an improvement in performance.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Charlie Meyer]

But where's the big improvement?

[Ed Zitron]

It's gone.

[Charlie Meyer]

I think that was them. I think that was the moment. I don't know what day they announced 4.5, but I think in 2020 that was game over.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Charlie Meyer]

And then they did the reasoning stuff. And the reasoning stuff was wrong.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, the reasoning thing was September 2024. And 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 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

And I could have had a moment of reflection when the reasoning models came out, because I was like, okay.

[Ed Zitron]

It was still the height of the fever though.

[Charlie Meyer]

I know. But I asked it a hard question. So 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 visualization of the thing. And I took one of the early reasoning models, Whichever1 it was.01 search. 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 in college math concept and visualize it. Yeah, you should be able to do that. And then it didn't. And then I kind of just didn't. I was kind of just like, oh, I guess I. And then I just didn't think about it. And then I just kept on kind of hoping that something exciting would happen.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And I can. 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 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, but I can get why someone who is stick within the booster ring might not immediately be like, fuck.

[Charlie Meyer]

Because.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah, I mean, and whatever. I mean, I don't know what the improvements were. And they improved on the benchmarks. That's fine. And I'm sure that the coding results are marginally better.

[Ed Zitron]

That's the thing. Marginally.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah. It's always marginally, but now it's marginally. But that's the thing. Three to four was sick.

[Ed Zitron]

Huge jump.

[Charlie Meyer]

That was sick. That was not marginal. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, I remember the jump. 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 what? It was like, wow, we made a computer do this and this. Cool. Okay, now what?

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah, and so I was vaguely aware of the line chart that I mentioned in that post. And so I was like, oh, all they have to do it is a freight train towards actual really cool things. Because it's like, just make it bigger. And therefore if we just need to make it bigger, then we do need more compute.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah. So that's where the freight train's over. And I just. 4.5 came out. I 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 that's interesting. But then it's like another whole year goes by and then GPT5 comes out. And like, what was that?

[Ed Zitron]

It was nothing. It was so strange.

[Charlie Meyer]

And so that was the final. So when I'm talking about my confluence of events, that cured me of my boosterism. 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. GPT5 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 want.

[Ed Zitron]

I wasn't because I have the stonewall of the Buddha. But it's. I was also just like. When it. When reasoning was coming up, going back to 2023, they were some real shit. The rumors around that Q star. It was. It was like 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. There was all of these big leaks. There was really no leaking around GPT5 other than a Wall Street Journal story towards the. 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 day, if I am wrong about all this, I don't think I am. I will admit it, I will explain why. But GPT5 I wasn't particularly worried about because it did. I could not fucking tell you what the, what it was going to be like. No one really. If you go back to 2023 and you look up GPT5, 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, and so that I, you and I had started exchanging emails because I, whatever. I saw your podcast and I sent someone my post over and it was, it was, it was interesting talking to you. And then 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. They announced paywalled chat colors.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes, I go through. No, no, I remember this, but go through this.

[Charlie Meyer]

In the announcement of GPT5, the biggest thing ever. They're like, for our paid subscribers, you can turn your chat yellow, which they still haven't released.

[Ed Zitron]

They still haven't released that.

[Charlie Meyer]

I don't. Well, I'm not a, I'm not a paying subscriber, so I, I've never seen a yellow.

[Ed Zitron]

I. I'm paying for chat.

[Charlie Meyer]

Gp See if you can turn it yellow.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm gonna see if I can do this live on air.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yellow or pink? Green might be an option.

[Ed Zitron]

I can change my window color. Well, the model's not gonna GPT. Are you Googling or chat GPT? No, I'm gonna ask it because it's fucking insane if this does. Searching the web. Yes, you can change. They did.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, can you though?

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, if you can't ask, like, I don't know what's a good. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

Is a place to write words. This is meant to answer things.

[Charlie Meyer]

Well, I know that's what I'm saying, but it's like they claim that it's this all knowing omniscient thing and it cannot tell you how to turn. Shouldn't it have just done it for you?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, or give me the bucket.

[Charlie Meyer]

It should have said Ed. Great question. Would you like it to be blue, yellow, pink or Charizard orange? But where was. That's what it should have done.

[Ed Zitron]

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 chatgpt Brown. It's insane. It's insane.

[Charlie Meyer]

I don't know if brown is one of the supported colors. Probably not next year.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Charlie Meyer]

That relies on the compute. Actually, the Oracle D unlocks brown as.

[Ed Zitron]

One of the colors. 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 such a weird moment because watching everyone try and be excited about it was really good. There was the whole Theo White wait. Not Theo Waite. And that's isn't 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 is a professional show where he did a whole thing saying GPT5 was the most amazing thing ever. And then.

[Charlie Meyer]

Oh, and then walked it back.

[Ed Zitron]

And then had to be like, yeah, actually, yes, Theo. Theo Brown. There we go. Theo Brown. He did the thing saying, I'm scared of how good GPT5 is. Then a week later, he's like, actually, it's not the same as when I used it. Which is craziest. That 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

GPT6.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, yeah, it's just. But also, what's that meant to them? Because GPT5 was this weird kind of myth. In the future, it's like, when we reach this, everything will get better. But now it's like, we're gonna get Claude Sonnet 5. I guess.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah, whatever. I mean, you're gonna get the next one. But that's the thing, is, if it's just continued marginal improvement, what am I.

[Ed Zitron]

What are we doing?

[Charlie Meyer]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And it's.

[Charlie Meyer]

Literally fine. I'm actually. I sound super sarcastic, but that's literally fine.

[Ed Zitron]

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 class cloud compute infrastructure, not the entire future revenue engine. Because it isn't that attractive.

[Charlie Meyer]

No, I mean, so I run a business and I think that a thing that startup people say is they say like you have product market fit, which is like, oh, your product is good. If like one of the criteria is if it went away today, would your users throw a fit?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Charlie Meyer]

Would you throw a fit if ChatGPT got uninstalled from your phone? You wouldn't. But would the general person be that upset? And I don't think think they would.

[Ed Zitron]

I think that there would be a contingent of people who'd be very upset.

[Charlie Meyer]

If you have a, like parasocial. I don't know if that's the right word.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Charlie Meyer]

If you're like in love with your GPT, then that would be like a death in your family and that's very.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Charlie Meyer]

It's like you named your baby after. No, I'm just saying like, if you.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, if you've got a baby name from ChatGPT, 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

They do is they sell a book called like the Baby Name Book and it has like a list of names in it.

[Ed Zitron]

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.

[Charlie Meyer]

Yeah, it's.

[Ed Zitron]

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. 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.

[Charlie Meyer]

You 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.

[Ed Zitron]

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

[Charlie Meyer]

There's no way to do that.

[Ed Zitron]

I don't have like some kind of calendar.

[Charlie Meyer]

No, no.

[Ed Zitron]

It's gotta be a reminder.

[Charlie Meyer]

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 if you 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. So I got sold at one point accounting software that was AI. The AI is going to categorize your transactions.

[Ed Zitron]

Sure.

[Charlie Meyer]

Can't do it. I was at a conference and it was whatever, May 20, May 21, May 22. 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.

[Ed Zitron]

That's what I decided, client conversation.

[Charlie Meyer]

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?

[Ed Zitron]

What did they say?

[Charlie Meyer]

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

[Ed Zitron]

Fuck yeah.

[Charlie Meyer]

Thank you. That's my accountant.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. My whole thing is. I know it's. I think with all of this AI coding stuff in the big tech realm, something's gonna break. Something really. But someone's gonna, Someone's gonna do something stupid.

[Charlie Meyer]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

There are people with jobs. Like it will involve people.

[Charlie Meyer]

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.

[Ed Zitron]

Hence the grim part of all this is like people are going to lose fucking jobs.

[Charlie Meyer]

But 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. But you know, they're never actually going to have a bad outcome happen to them.

[Ed Zitron]

Which is why we need to write things to put their name because at some point there needs to be a record of this.

[Charlie Meyer]

Of course. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

So I'm going to wrap it there. Charlie, where can people find you?

[Charlie Meyer]

So I have a blog blog charliemyer co, which is like where kind of my writings go. But I'm also trying to set up put up a newsletter. So that's CS meyer.substack.com and my name is spelled M E Y E R Hell yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And I of course am Ed Zitron. You can find me on the [e-mail] that's where I live. I will put all the links to Charlie's stuff of course in in the episode notes, but it's good for you to hear it now. And yes, 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 I 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 Matt Osawski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ez betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat wheresyoured at to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us.

[Charlie Meyer]

Out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Foreign.

[Ed Zitron]

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[Charlie Meyer]

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