Cloning takes a weekend, finding the 38% took months

Anthony Ettinger, founder of RSS Amplifier, reported that 38% of the feed directory's 83,940 feeds with items—32,114 feeds carrying exactly ten posts—had unsellable ad inventory due to a rule that dropped the only ad slot at the end of a ten-post feed. Ettinger argues that while a weekend AI-assisted clone can replicate features, it cannot replicate the months of real-world observation needed to find such issues, which is the core value of his $150/hour consulting service.

Cloning takes a weekend, finding the 38% took months 2026-08-19, by Anthony “chovy” Ettinger. How this was written: drafted with an AI assistant from my own notes, then edited by me. I posted this on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anthonyettinger hire-us-or-well-clone-your-ass-in-a-weekend-share-7495764248321638402-moY1/ yesterday: Hire us or we'll clone your ass in a weekend. $150/hour on a c2c. It reads like bravado. It is closer to a complaint, and the complaint is about where the value went. The cloning part is true and boring Pick a SaaS product. Auth, billing, a dashboard, a table with filters, a settings page, an API with keys. A competent person with an agent can have that standing up over a weekend. I am not bragging about a skill here. Everybody who does this work full time knows it, and the ones selling six month rebuild engagements know it best of all. So if the software is the moat, there is no moat. That part of the pitch is a threat you can verify yourself in two days. What a weekend does not buy Here is what I actually did yesterday, on my own product, and it is the argument. RSS Amplifier is a feed directory. It carries sponsored items in the feeds it publishes, one per ten entries, three at most, never last. That rule shipped weeks ago and looked fine. Yesterday I went looking at why one feed had no ads in it, and found that the rule places an ad after every tenth post and refuses to let one sit at the end, so a feed with exactly ten posts has its only slot at the very end and drops it. Ten is the number an RSS document conventionally carries. In that directory, 32,114 of the 83,940 feeds with items carry exactly ten. So 38% of the inventory had been unsellable since the day the feature shipped, by arithmetic, with no error anywhere and every test passing. Later the same day, the author enrichment. It reads each blog to work out who writes it. One blog on GitHub Pages published no rel=me, no h-card, and one outbound link, to the theme its author used. The pass fetched the page, correctly found nobody, and moved on. The author's GitHub account was sitting in the hostname the feed is served from. Ten out of ten of those feeds went from naming nobody to naming a real person with two to seven ways to contact them, off a rule that costs no network request at all because it is arithmetic on a URL. You cannot clone either of those. They are not features. They are things that only exist after somebody runs the thing against the real web for months and then goes and looks at what it actually did, rather than at what it was supposed to do. The pitch, said plainly The weekend clone gets you the features. It does not get you the person who notices that a default of ten is eating 38% of your revenue, or that the identity you need is in the hostname you already have. That gap is the whole business. It is why the rate is what it is, and it is why I keep writing down the mistakes in public rather than the finished screenshots. The finished screenshot is the part anybody can copy by Sunday.