AI made fake demos easy. My BS detection has never been more valuable

I spent 40 minutes watching a 20-minute video demo the other day. Not because it was good.

Because I kept having to pause every time the presenter waved his hand over something impossibly complex and cut to "...and voilà, your entire tech stack, mapped and analyzed so you can generate a highly detailed 3-year modernization roadmap at the click of a button!"

Every pause, I dug into their docs. Or just zoomed into the screen. Every time: BS.

I have a visceral reaction for misrepresented business software, having lived through the consequences as an employee and rescued my clients as a consultant. The impact can span years or be outright devastating.

Amazing demos that only work when the script is followed to a T. Promises of security and scalability the salesperson doesn't even understand. Deception glossed over with compliments and promises of a brighter tomorrow.

My duty to my clients is to sit in those meetings and spot the smoke and mirrors in real time. Asking the questions that come from decades of implementing, customizing, and integrating platforms, applications, protocols, and frameworks across the full ugly spectrum of enterprise software.

Unfortunately, LLMs are fantastic at generating demos and prepping salespeople with carefully crafted, utterly devoid of meaning talking points. My skill in software BS detection has never been more valuable.

In this particular demo: your stack doesn't just magically appear in diagrams you can drill down into. There's a heavy lift consulting engagement to get your systems integrated and your business context RAG-pipelined before you get anywhere near that point. Fair enough, a service Codality offers. They just skip over that part in the demo.

The standards for what modernization and simplification actually mean, and the trade-offs behind those momentous 3-year strategies? Whatever the attached LLM model thinks is best that day.

The software development component was the cherry on top. He breezed through the screens with the "impressive" generation of a business-context-grounded development plan from an uploaded PRD. Zooming in, it was clear the "PRD" was a highly detailed, technically complete spec. That amazing planning was just summarizing a PDF.

I'm thinking about turning this into a series. Post and video takedowns of AI-polished software turds. This rant is draft one.

Any AI slight of hand had you pausing on a fantastical demo?