alt Hacker NewsThe age of Pump and Dump software
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It feels worth separating two things here that have unfortunately become commingled: crypto pump and dumps and AI-enabled spikes.
Haven't we learned by now that all crypto coins are pump-and-dump schemes? Unless you're HODLing BTC or whatever... (yes, I'm a huge crypto skeptic)
As for the actual software, why isn't it worth exploring how to better incorporate this current wave of AI into our lives? I've idly wondered what an "AI coding factory" would look like, and Gas Town is an interesting instantiation of the idea. I've also wondered how to best incorporate memory and personal knowledge into an agent that I can self-host. Clawdbot (now Molt?) is an interesting take. People exploring these ideas shouldn't be shot down.
What I fail to understand is why anybody would buy a coin attached to these projects: what are the buyers expecting to happen to the coin? Is this yet another instance of the greater fool theory[1] that we saw with NFTs?
I also fail to understand why the creators are getting involved. I guess the author is trying to answer that question. I'd like to think of a more charitable interpretation than reputation laundering, but I'm not sure what it is... I'm open to suggestions :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe there should be a term for when an industry is at its wits ends so far gone that crypto scams are viable.
I love this way of framing it.
Most software is in this category, but now we are being honest about it and can make it without paying a team of four for a year.
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.
Crypto scams sucked before vibe coding and sucked after vibe coding.
Made it a bit more accessible certainly but the problem here lies squarely on the crypto side here in my mind.
The sheer power of AI astroturfing right now is kind of blowing my mind, and not in a good way.
In the span of roughly 3 days, I went from never once having heard the terms "clawdbot" or "gas town" to seeing them brought up repeatedly throughout every single tech discussion space I frequent (with no real use cases ever brought up, of course, just vague claims it being the next big thing, I still have no idea what either of these things actually do).
This "clawdbot"'s github repository apparently went from 5k stars to 70k stars in the span of a week, according to the graph proudly displayed on the readme. And I'm supposed to believe these are 70k real people, not 70k bot accounts.
I think this is the final nail on the coffin for human-to-human communication on the internet. I'm just going to assume it's all bots now.
isn't this all kind of obvious? Why would a software tool need an associated token? If a developer asked for donations in almost any existing coin I could see it making sense. Especially if they aren't able to access traditional banking for some reason. But why would someone need to launch a coin as part of an AI agent orchestration project?
"a schizoprenic vibe coded fever dream " Is a very accurate description of gas town
Though I won't discuss specifics here, I've personally witnessed several of these scams firsthand from the inside over the last 5 years, to the sum of ~1 billion dollars -- it's not a new phenomenon, but maybe it's going mainstream.
But I would argue this is as old as the tides, it's just been accelerated by:
1) effectively unregulated gambling in the form of crypto tokens,
2) AI acceleration that the average person is too uneducated (sorry, it's true) to understand or evaluate the capabilities of and
3) pervasive, high-speed unregulated social media that props up insane technological claims and often outright lies for financial gain -- at least long enough and loud enough until the dump
You won't believe the PR schemes that brilliant insiders cook on Telegram for gullible audiences on Twitter, but it's not my story to tell here.
The only reason this has come to software is that ai slop coding has advanced the point where people who have no clue what they are doing with computers but know how to hype up an audience have learned "one weird trick to optimize rugpulls", and normies haven't yet realized they are the suckers at the table (or they haven't lost enough money yet for the bandwagon to move on to the next scam).
All of this actually makes me very sad as a person who's been working in AI + crypto for the better part of a decade because I think the tech is cool. Alas, you cannot beat the capitalist machine or underestimate people's greed or what they will do when given anonymity and freedom from reprecussions.
Wonder if we'll get a response from Yegge or clawdbot creator (either here or as a blog post). This is a fairly damning indictment.
FWIW the creator of Clawd (now Molt) is staunchly anti-crypto and has been from the start.
Accusing him of a pump & dump or being in on the scam is really unfair imo, he's been working very hard (and publicly) on Clawd, and has visibly had to deal with a massive influx of attention / hype and a wave of crypto grifters trying to force unofficial tokens down his throat. It must be hugely stressful.
The Ralph & Gastown devs embraced (but did not create) associated crypto projects (Yegge later distanced himself after criticism). They made their software, it gained in popularity and crypto bros latched on of their own accord. It would be interesting to see how many highly principled hners here would turn down mid six figures being offered to them for a tweet or a post acknowledging a token..
As an aside: meme tokens are an attention economy mmog - you may not like the game, but I can assure you those who play it know the rules.
I wonder if the Unix philosophy of small apps will eventually further the capabilities of AI in regards to app development. If these AI could be used contribute to a shared library of small apps, then maybe that library could be used to iteratively build more and more capable apps. Shoulders of giants and all that.
That would certainly be preferable to the flood of AI-fueled monoliths predicted by this author. But maybe I'm being too optimistic.
pumpndumpware. catchy
> This is how it works: Fame hungry tech bro
Definitely not. Those people were already famous. And famous people turning their fame into cash has always been a thing.
Not that I condone...
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.
Here's a counterthesis:
This is people having fun with a new technology that is far from perfect, is full of unknowns, but is ripe for exploration and discovery.
Gas Town itself is a piece of speculative fiction: throwing out a hypothesis as to what might be possible were inference to drastically drop in price. Its supervisor + isolated worker + merge factory approach is an experimental spike into how agentic coding could play out at scale.
And funnily enough, it is also the approach that Anysphere arrived at through their own experimentation.
Karpathy's alien technology metaphor is particularly apt. No one knows how to use these tools properly yet. We're having some success and a lot of fun, but really we're only going to find out by experimenting in public and sharing our results. Which means the positive and negative.