Scott Milam Townsend

My $900 AI lawnmower lost to a guy named Alon. I was paying about $100 a month for lawn care. Then I found an AI-enabled, self-driving lawnmower on sale for $900. The thing paid for itself. Hit a button, cut my grass, perfect lawn forever. A little money upfront for a problem I'd never think about again. Hello Vibe Cutting! I'm telling you this because it's what I'm seeing happen everywhere right now, including inside AppSumo. AI shows up with a promise you can genuinely believe. Then the real cost, the implementation, the maintenance, and what it actually delivers turn out to be somewhat else entirely. So it arrived and I told it to go cut. I figured. See you later, humans. No more need for you. 👋 Figured it would just look at my yard with its cameras and figure out the grass. Nope. First you have to map the lawn, supposedly can do it "automatically." The air quotes are for dramatic effect. The mower drove all over the place. Then it ran out of battery and crawled back to charge. I tried to map more and it mapped the wrong part of the yard. I tried again, finally got it to map the right thing. It cut. Sort of. There were patches it missed entirely. It left the clippings exactly where they fell instead of bagging them. It didn't touch the edges. It did, however, find time to mow down a row of my wife's plants. She was not pleased. That was day one. Day two I learned it also has to sit in a specific spot to get GPS. Every problem I solved revealed the next one underneath it. Here is the part that stuck with me. As amazing as the idea is, it's still only $100 to have a person do it, and do it better. Could the machine eventually beat that? Sure. Maybe. My vibe cutting is the exact same gap I feel with vibe coding and AI right now. The promise is a button. Describe what you want, hit go, get a finished product. What you actually get is a thing that drives all over the place, runs out of battery halfway through and pisses off your wife. The demo is magic. The implementation, the cost, and what it actually delivers are still a long way from the pitch. Will it get there? Maybe. Will it stay too expensive to be worth it? Also maybe. I don't know yet, and anyone who tells you they do is selling something. What I do know is that Alon comes by twice a month, cuts the grass, blows the leaves, does a better job than my robot, and I like seeing him. For now the button I keep hitting is the one that calls Alon. I returned the mower, I'll see Alon on Friday!👯‍♂️