2026-02-16The Sideprocalypse

You can't open a feed today without having AI boosters fling word salad like "agentic engineering" or "openclaw" into your beautiful but disapproving face. I'm terrible at predicting the future—you should ask me about selling NVIDIA stock in early 2022 some time—but one thing seems abundantly clear at this point.

There's a wonderful Swedish proverb called "elda för kråkorna" (building a fire for the crows) that evokes the futility of someone lighting a nice warm fire indoors and then throwing the doors wide open, inviting the snow and sleet. Are you one of the thousands of developers with dreams of building a little SaaS on the side? Something you've been thinking about for a while, hacking away at on evenings and weekends, dreaming of the day you can have a couple of hundred paying customers giving you $19.99 a month?

Sorry to be the bringer of bad news, but that dream's dead. Doornail. Dodo. Parrot.

Every minute you put into that thing, be it your own time or your LLM agent's, is a minute for the crows. Imagine that beautiful but fragile little idea of yours curled up in a freshly-dug pit in your backyard, Claude and Gemini standing over it, chuckling and high-fiving each other.

Listen: every idea you've ever had, every single one, some cocaine-addled sales critter has had too. And they're better than you at SEO.

What's that you're saying? Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. We've all been conditioned to accept tombstone spinners on first load or purchase flows that straight-up don't work, and there are walled gardens and tollbooths everywhere you look. React ate the web, Safari kneecapped it, Google stopped linking to it, and none of the Zaibatsu US corporations who hold the cards want you to succeed. The future, if there is a future in software, lies in high-touch enterprise sales. There are a select few companies allowed to make money on the Internet today, and if you have any sense of self-preservation you need to glom onto one of those and hold it like the Dickens. Give up those childish dreams of independence.

If you're a hopeful SaaS builder you may be first in line, but you can at least take grim satisfaction in the fact that the sloptimists, the hype-men, the breathless agents-are-working-while-I-sleep people, they're equally fucked when this all comes home to roost. The marginal value of code today is—well, possibly not zero, since the people selling spades for this frantic gold rush are doing okay for now—but it's dropping like a lead balloon. Josh Collinsworth has it right, AI boosterism is a class privilege. But rest assured that this revolution, too, will end up eating its own. They fancy themselves the masters of mighty bot armies, an unstoppable force at their fingertips that will build them a software empire. But nobody will find it, nobody will pay for it, and all those tokens will have been burned for someone else's gain, a sad bonfire offering to the datacenter and GPU crows cawing overhead.