“If your $200k/year employees spend their time vibe-coding a replacement for a $15/mo Calendly subscription, your business is not going to make it.” – Davide Grieco, Head of Growth, Clay
This morning I talked with a super excited founder, they were walking me through a very comprehensive and sophisticated home-grown application to manage his solo consulting firm: calendar events, to-dos, email drafts, CRM, charts of progress, red-yell0w-green indicators. I’d never seen anything so sophisticated for a 1-person business, or a 10-person business.
Then I looked in the address bar, a local file served out of a Claude Co-work directory.
Of course.
This meant it doesn’t work on his phone. It didn’t appear to connect to his native email, calendar, contacts, or reminders. It only works on this specific machine for as long as he has sufficient Claude tokens. A bit of a reversion in a world of always-on, mobile connectivity.
It was the most elaborate example of actively not learning existing tools I’ve seen since February .
He is currently searching for a software engineer to help deploy it.
Of course.
Now admittedly, I’m guilty of the same crime.
I greatly enjoyed building tablestrength, and ‘brewbook’, and ‘familymap’, they have become my go-to tools for the job I’ve created them for. There are other tried and true solutions to the problems I’m solving with these apps. I didn’t need to create my own, and just to emphasize it, I probably shouldn’t have.
A SaaS sales leader posted this week about running his entire monthly pipeline review through Claude via a Salesforce MCP integration.
No more cludgy UI. No more need to coordinate with his co-workers. Data in seconds. He was delighted, giddy with how much faster the review process will be next month. Not questioning if the monthly review itself was actually valuable – or if there was some other higher leverage activity, or even different frequency, his organization could be focused on, now the data is more accessible.
Early plastic household goods were skinned in woodgrain because manufacturers didn’t yet know what plastic actually was or if consumers would accept it. The first metal joints mimicked carpentry joints. The first iPhone used an excessive number of scarce pixels to recreate a yellow notepad and a wooden magazine rack.
When the microwave came to market, cookbooks encouraged cooking whole chicken in it.
We first dress new capabilities in the clothing we’re familiar with. Then we figure out what the new thing can actually do.
The vibe-coded dashboard still looks important. The monthly pipeline review through Claude still a monthly pipeline review. A email expanded with AI to assert significance from an earlier age.
We’re in the skeuomorphism phase of LLMs. What if the value is, in fact, zero? What if LLMs exposed just how unthoughtful, ineffective, and backwards looking the bulk of our daily activities are?
What if we’re all Jeff Koons bringing weight to emptiness? Creating enormous, plaster sculptures of inflatables and trite ephemera out of some combination of “shoulds” and “we’ve always done” and “how I was trained” and “not my job” for a world slowly dissolving into history.
“…looks like a landing strip.
…a control tower made of bamboo.
…a satellite dish built of mud and straw.
….men light torches and place them alongside the runway. Others use flags to wave landing signals.
They wait.
But the planes never come.” – Dimitris Xygalatas
It all appears significant. Yet, just going through the motions.
“If you couldn’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it.” – Brad Koehn
The cartoon at the top isn’t a joke about LLM’s. It’s a joke about how slowly we let go of yesterday.
Previously: You’re Not Going to Need It.