I was looking at Instagram yesterday—mostly hoping to see if my cousin’s tomato seedlings had survived the late frost—when a sponsored post cornered me about something called PersonaGen.
The fellow posting it seemed deeply agitated that people are renting their business brains on monthly subscriptions. He called ordinary chatbot add-ons ‘a prompt pack wearing a subscription hat,’ which made me chuckle because I certainly know what it feels like to have five different services quietly billing my debit card eleven dollars a month for things I forgot existed.
His solution to this ongoing modern robbery? He wants you to buy his ‘hard-coded 15-pillar JSON schema’ so you can ‘own the brain.’
Now, I don’t pretend to be a programmer, though I did once manage our church’s membership directory on an old DOS machine that sounded like a blender full of gravel. But I know sales talk when I hear it. A ‘15-pillar JSON schema’ is just a very loud, computerized way of saying you have to sit down and write fifteen different rules about your business into a text file so the computer doesn’t tell you to sell your stock for half-price.
Every few years, Silicon Valley accidentally reinvents the three-ring binder and tries to charge you for the privilege of filling out the tabs yourself.
It is refreshing that he isn’t trying to hook people into a recurring subscription. I’ll give him credit for that much. We have reached a point where paying for something once feels almost miraculous, like finding a twenty-dollar bill in an old winter coat. But turning your daily work into a rigid set of coded rules feels like an awful lot of unpaid labor just to keep a chatbot from hallucinating your pricing structure.
My late husband kept forty years of auto parts pricing in a spiral notebook in his breast pocket. The cover was held together with electrical tape, and it never once hallucinated that a carburetor was free.
How many separate software subscriptions are currently siphoning off ten dollars a month from your bank account before you notice?
Source:
Every day I find another appliance that needs Wi-Fi for no reason. Every day I yell about it. Follow me for daily common-sense takedowns of overpriced tech that will make you ROFL.
Originally published on Substack.
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