Astra killed Claude. Claude killed Gemini. Gemini killed Google. Google committed suicide, and that's the end of the story. Somewhere in between, and nobody even sent flowers.
Why am I always crawling backwards into the same graveyard? How many times can one industry die this month? Tell me, genuinely, what changed between these products apart from a thinking level slider and your affiliate link. Why does every funeral have the same sponsor?
“New model just dropped” is not a personality, it is a subscription.
And can we talk about who is even buying these things. Like actually buying them, not retweeting the benchmark screenshot. Show me the affiliate dashboard, bro. Who is on the other end of that link?
The agencies don’t have clients who’ll even pay for their team’s ChatGPT Plus seat, so it’s not the agencies. The only people funding this entire ecosystem are the clients themselves, direct, with no middleman, credit card in hand at 11pm.
These LLMs have figured out something agencies never could: it is a very addictive game for a client who understands their own domain but doesn’t want to pay a stranger to translate it into code. That gap, the one between “I know what I want” and “I don’t want to hire you to build it,” that’s the whole market right now. That’s the funeral home’s business model.
The clients never understood the code anyway
Here’s the part that stings a little. Even when we built it for them, properly, with a team and a contract and a Slack channel, the client never understood the code. They just trusted us.
So in a weird way they’re in a better position now. They still don’t understand the code, that part hasn’t changed, but now it’s free, or fifteen dollars a month, and it comes with a chat window that’s nicer to them than their last agency was.
A client who couldn’t read a for-loop in 2019 still can’t read one in 2026. The only thing that changed is who’s smiling while they don’t read it.
And funny enough, they still come back to us. That’s the twist nobody puts in the keynote. I have had clients messaging me with their Lovable, Supabase, Bolt-generated websites, full send, vibes-only, proud of themselves, asking me to just “take a quick look.” We open the code.
We don’t understand what the AI was thinking. We ask the AI to explain itself. The AI does not understand what we’re asking either, it just apologizes and rewrites something else.
Production breaks. Client panics. And at the end of that chain, somehow, it’s still our skill that’s at fault. Not the model’s. Not the fourteen layers of generated abstraction nobody asked for. Ours.
The 2am zip file
This is my favorite genre of client story and I hate that I have a favorite.
Someone goes home, opens their laptop on the kitchen table, types “I need an Uber for vegetables” into a text box, and receives a zip file. They don’t extract it.
They’re scared of it, honestly, and I don’t blame them, I’ve seen what’s in some of these zips. So instead they call me. At 2am. Urgent meeting energy, for a folder they haven’t even opened yet.
The zip file is the new “can you hop on a quick call.”
There is no roadmap, no scope doc, no design file. Just a compressed folder and a deadline that existed only in their head five minutes ago.
SEO is dead, according to the guy who sells SEOÂ courses
Every week someone posts “SEO is dead” and every week that same someone is still selling a $299 course on how to rank on Google. If SEO is really dead, why do you need three carousel slides and a countdown timer to explain it to me.
SEO isn’t dead. SEO got a new landlord. It used to be ten blue links and now it’s an AI Overview eating your click before you even get to the page you spent four months optimizing. That’s not death, that’s eviction. Big difference. Dead means nobody’s paying rent anymore. This is more like the building got bought out and now there’s a chatbot standing at the door summarizing your lease before you walk in.
Nothing on LinkedIn is ever “dead.” It’s just “disrupted” until the next carousel needs a hook.
Meanwhile the actual traffic numbers are doing something weirder and quieter than any of the posts admit. Some sites are getting cited by the AI Overview and getting zero clicks for it. Free labor, basically, except the invoice never shows up. Nobody’s writing a carousel about that part because
“your content is being used to answer questions on a page you’ll never see a visitor from”
doesn’t have the same energy as “SEO IS DEAD 💀.”
Software engineers are cooked, posted from a software engineer’s job.
This one’s my favorite because of who’s saying it. It’s always someone employed, full salary, benefits, writing “software engineers are cooked” from a laptop their engineering job paid for. Nobody who is actually cooked has the bandwidth to post about being cooked. They’re too busy debugging the thing that broke at 2am, remember that guy.
[Do we still need software engineers in 2026 after GPT-6 Astra?Software engineers are still going to be needed as long as AI hasn’t invented its own programming language. So I guess…
Here’s what’s actually happening, since we’re being honest instead of doing the discourse. Junior roles did shrink. That part’s real, hiring for entry-level dropped and it’s not some LinkedIn fantasy, it’s in the numbers.
But “cooked” implies the whole profession is over, and what’s actually happening is the job moved. It moved from “type the function” to “explain to the AI why the function it wrote is wrong, then explain again, then just write it yourself at 1am because the AI got confident and incorrect at the same time.”
The AI didn’t replace the engineer. It replaced the easy 60% of the ticket and kept the annoying 40% for you, personally, forever.
Nobody got cooked. Somebody just moved the stove into your house and told you it’s a smart stove now, it does the cooking itself, except it still burns things and you’re still the one who has to taste it before it goes out.
I’ll marry the tool that works, the rest can RSVP to their own funeral
Just kidding, I’m already married.
I’m not anti-tool. I’m anti-funeral-industrial-complex. If something genuinely works for me, I will use it, gladly, no ego about it. If it works better than the last thing, I will commit. I will put a ring on it (just kidding). The rest of the lineup, the ones that exist purely to announce the previous one is now legacy, they can get in line behind Gemini and GPT and wait their turn.
It’s coming for all of them eventually. It’s coming very soon. Someone’s already drafting the next tool’s death, and yes, it has an affiliate link in the bio.
If you’ve ever gotten a 2am call about a zip file, you already know exactly what this is about.
