this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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This concierge approach is nothing new; it existed even before LLMs are a thing.
One of my courses in undergrad computer science is Human-Computer Interaction, in which we learn about user experience (UX) concepts.
One of the things we learnt is to validate our ideas quickly and cheaply before putting a lot of time, effort and money into building the thing.
To do so, what we can do is build prototypes. The early versions may be be low-fidelity (lofi) and are scrappy. The later, high-fidelity (hifi) ones would mimic the functionality of the actual products, and may even appear to work to end users when in reality it could be just be manual effort behind the scenes.
The example given during lecture is the development of a ticketing system. To test the idea out, one could simply get a dude to sit in the "machine" and give out slips of paper.
Anyway, I am explaining all these because this seems like a surprise to those without the same educational background. Long story short, what this startup did is completely normal in the realm of software.
We may have better tools like Figma to simulate browser / mobile frontend experiences, but nothing is stopping us from going back to the basics and doing it this way.
I get it, you enjoyed your HCI course. I did too.
What you need to understand is you can do this, but you can't mislead investors into thinking your Mechanical Turk isn't a man in a box. That is fraud.
I can't stress enough: this is literally why Elizabeth Holmes is in jail right now.
I don't think that's anywhere close to what was happening here, though.
There already are transcription services (which are now being branded as AI but are using tech that has existed for 15 years at least). So, surely this startup's claim is that they're going to make a more advanced transcription service using new AI algorithms. And as a "proof of concept" they secretly use a human to perform better transcriptions than any existing algorithm does. So in reality it proves jack shit.
Their interface is just a rehash of existing services, the only thing new they could bring to the table is an actually better algorithm, which they don't have, so they just faked it. Meaning they have nothing of value at all.
Not just normal, but correct. Try out a workflow before enshrining it. Nothing is perfect from the beginning.
Ahh, no. If this guy's company was in the prototype stage and they were doing this with potential, knowing clients then I'd agree with y'all. But this is someone selling a lie.
It'd be like if I said I was selling a multiplayer game, and when it came out, all the other "players" were NPCs with your friend's username. Don't worry, I'll figure out the actual multiplayer later! This is normal and correct!
Have you heard about the term
.io games? Because this is indeed something that happens regularly…