Pump and dump software is a hilarious phrase but I thought it would have meant something slightly different. My idea of pump and dump software is the proliferation ai-generated sites (Vercel links) that are sent to the 404 graveyard after a few days of someone not getting any traction on it.

Maybe there should be a term for when an industry is at its wits ends so far gone that crypto scams are viable.

Noticed the same. Doing a quick analysis of clawdbot myself I figured there are many spam domains that are used to backlink. Now there is a new domain being advertised as a replacement of the original. It points to the same landing page though it is hard to say if this comes from the original authors. All of it seems to be related to a crypto scheme. The astroturfing on reddit is also pretty bad.

This is obviously in a blip in the grand scheme of things but it is just an indication what all of these social media platforms are destined to become without some sort of intervention.

The framing of the title makes me wonder what we as humans will think of software from this time 100s of years from now. Will the future be a complicated, dense ecosystem of interconnected intelligent systems, putting our current complexity to shame?

Or in the future will we look at the current time as the Wild West, the time when software moved more swiftly than the law. Where oil was there for anyone with a big enough guns to protect it.

Maybe we will experience our own butlerian jihad and realize that the thinking machines were controlling us the whole time. We will look at TikTok how we now look at the proliferation of ether in the 1800s.

The “How it works” section is an absolute mess. Each bullet uses a different pronoun, so it’s not clear who the actors actually are and how this all fits together. How are the “crypto bros” who approach the “tech person” related to the “fame hungry tech bro” that vibe-coded the failed app?

I’m sure there’s a tremendous long tail of scam attempts these days, but I’d be surprised if crypto scams haven’t already seen their high watermark in terms of actual victims.

How it normally works is that founders sell their vision to VC's (if they go that route). I guess there are crypto people who want a piece of that now? But they don't want any actual stake in a business, they just want their crypto coin to be magically connected to it somehow, hopefully with some encouragement that is at least adjacent to shilling.

Founding startups is about making money, but I believe it's possible to be too cynical about that; it doesn't leave enough room for people who sincerely believe in the vision they're selling. It's possible to believe your own hype.

I recently had cursor basically make me a web interface to detect skiers in a live stream at my local mountain. The stream shows skiers coming off the lift with their back towards the camera. I wanted to know the average lap time of skiers to better estimate the lift line wait time since the lift itself has no camera.

It did a really good job with some prompting for fixes along the way. Turns out, it's really hard to individually ID people who are basically wearing the same thing and with similar colors.

All that is to say, I used it for an hour to see if my idea would work and be feasible.

Excellent article! Let’s also not forget another major category where they dump the vibe-coded crap: the AI-hype social-media “developer” influencer FOMO posts. Essentially a life-coach pyramid scheme repackaged for tech, selling “how to become a life-coach” playbooks to the next wave of would-be life-coaches to sell their course.

"a schizoprenic vibe coded fever dream " Is a very accurate description of gas town