Hello There:

My apologies for missing a few weeks of newsletters. I have an excellent excuse: I got married. 😊

Last Friday, I met Las Vegas SEO celebrity, Kristine Schachinger. We jumped from dissecting the latest SEO tricks to debating the future of AI, covering more ground in one conversation than most people do in a week.

Kristine’s perspective: AI coding assistants face significant challenges due to their limitations in generating reliable code — specifically, code that still requires extensive human review, undermining the potential cost benefits of AI-assisted development.

At the same time we learned:

• Cursor – Investor interest in AI coding assistants is exploding, according to TechCrunch. San Francisco-based Anysphere, the developer of coding assistant Cursor, is in talks to raise capital at a valuation of nearly $10 billion, Bloomberg reported. The round would come about three months after Anysphere raised $100 million at a pre-money valuation of $2.5 billion.

• Y Combinator – A quarter of the Y Combinator latest group of startups have 95% of their codebases generated by AI, according to managing partner Jared Friedman.

• Anthropic prediction – Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that AI will write 90% of code in six months and automate software development within a year.

• GitClear study – Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey showed that 63% of professional developers are currently using AI, and another 14% said they plan to begin using AI soon. Code review platform GitClear, however, reports multiple signals of declining code quality, including a level of code duplication 10 times higher than two years ago.

AI-assisted coding represents the single most transformative disruption unleashed by generative AI, and will greatly accelerate the pace of innovation in the decades to come. Having already developed two MVPs ourselves using Co.dev’s coding assistant, we believe the writing is on the wall.

The other major news concerns the release of another virus from Wuhan, China. This one proved to be just as infectious as COVID-19. Manus, built by startup Butterfly Effect, was quickly praised by such tech leaders as Jack Dorsey, with some calling it “the second DeepSeek.”

MIT Technology Review’s Caiwei Chen was able to test Manus with three assignments. While Chen thought the comparison with DeepSeek was not “quite right,” it’s quite evident that Chinese players are pushing the autonomous AI agent envelope in their own way.

On the trend front, we have DOGE wreaking havoc in both Washington and on Wall Street, which brings us to the trend of the week, Transparency.

Thanks for reading,

In every issue, we feature a trend chosen from our Trendscape 2024 list of top trends. We hope you enjoy this new resource.

5. Transparency

In February, DOGE, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, debuted a website that promised transparency into the operation of this unofficial governmental department. As The New York Times reports, the website was riddled with errors but instead of owning up to its mistakes, the group has obscured the details of some new claims, countering a growing transparency trend.

As the Times reports, the DOGE site allowed the public to fact-check its work by comparing its figures with federal spending databases. The New York Times, at first, found a way around the group’s attempts to hide its work by embedding the federal identification numbers of grants in its source code. Musk’s group later removed those identifiers, a major reversal of Musk’s core promises about his group: that it would be “maximally transparent.”

Continue reading on Ubertrends…

The Jacobyte is Back! 😂 

Ed.: Meet The Jacobyte — an irreverent and sharp-tongued columnist who delivers an unfiltered mix of innuendo, rumors, and biting satire.

💦 Welcome to Jaco’s nightly emission! 🙃 As the acerbic columnist-in-residence, it’s Jaco’s unenviable task to choose from all the asshat occurrences of the week, cherry-picking those chunks you will be blowing all over your office mates tomorrow morning! 🤮 As the French like to say, “En garde.”

🤖 Jaco doesn’t know about you, but things in Cupertino have devolved from morose to an absolute shitshow! You know things are bad when your own supplier, Foxconn, can build an AI model, hornily called FoxBrain, capable of data analysis, mathematics, reasoning and code generation, in just four weeks!

📱This astonishing news made Jaco wonder: If the iPhone manufacturer can crank out an advanced reasoning model in just four weeks, WTF is the hold up at Apple?

💩 The brouhaha began in all earnest last Friday, when noted Apple watcher, John Gruber, received this statement from spaceship Apple:

🤬 As someone Jaco doesn’t like to quote says, “Jackie, you space cadet, you’re fired!” 🔥 Gruber suffered a conniption fit to put it mildly. It took him five days to react with a 4,348-word tirade: “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino.”

🤔 Jaco is positive Gruber’s post reverberated throughout the halls of Cupertino (to the tune of the “Sands of Iwo Jima”). If that wasn’t bad enough, MacRumors dug up another gem today:

👀 Well if it’s still coming, Jaco thinks it’s one damn long orgasm! 💦🍆 Assist me please, swiftly! 😂 🙈 Repeat after me fanboys and fangirls: “How come Apple AI boss John Giannandrea still has a job?!?” Is John waiting for the 15th Siri anniversary for a shitcan-ebration? 🤬 Jaco thinks it’s high time to revive the boss’ #youcallthatinnovation sticker:

😅 Jaco has to confess. That Signal hottie, Meredith Whittaker, has everyone’s ears and everything else! Meredith is warning all you Manus freaks that using that Kung Flu agentic app is like letting China peek under your kimono and you know what mommie says when you mix metaphors: You get pregnant with unwanted Chinese babies!

🎲 Anyone who has watched that movie, The Butterfly Effect, knows that a small change in one part of the globe can have major repercussions half way around the world! Inquiring minds want to know, what inspired Yichao ‘Peak’ Ji to name that Wuhan Manus company after that movie? What profound effect will the use of Manus, which means “hand” in Latin, have on us?

🧤 Listen to Meredith and keep your Manus out of my anus, warns Jaco. Talk about a profound privacy issue! As The Bee Gees once sang, “How Deep Is Your Glove?” 🤩

🥵 Speaking of unrequited love. The final asshat-of-the-week award goes to Mark “Hot Or Not” Zuckerberg who is suing former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams because her revelations are cutting too close to his bone. Jaco has ordered a copy of “Careless People” and will be reporting on “Zuck Me” episodes real soon.

Send your rumors, tips and biting repartee to: [email protected].