In light of the recent acquisition announcement and the mother of all threads with some members accusing me of being a marketing shill carrying water for Coda and Grammarly, so I decided to simulcast this article which was penned a week before the announcement in my Substack. Not a word of it has been edited. You can read the original article below or here.
I’ve been a frequent critic of Coda and Grammarly. But I’ve also embraced both products in my work, and my AI Team’s work. Coda, specifically drives profitability with the AI Vision testing and tuning suite we built in 2020 for Nevada DOT. Our solution tracks more than 3 billion vehicular events in the Las Vegas Valley every month. It was made possible by a testing framework I built in Coda that accelerates human validation and tagging of real-time video from 185 highway cameras.
Today we use that pattern as the bedrock of other AI training and testing systems. It doesn’t use Coda AI. Rather, it is purely a workflow and artifact management system designed to create hyper-productivity for my team. We currently use it to test audio conversations for the QSR (quick-serve restaurant) industry. And with Grammarly working inside Coda, we are slightly more productive as we analyze thousands of transcripts daily.
Coda will undoubtedly save my last document someday, but before it does, it has, and will continue to provide a vast array of benefits. I also predict that it will accelerate these benefits when it is smartly blended with Grammarly.
Several community contributors believe the merger with Grammarly is the signal of a decline. I think it’s precisely the opposite, but I am under no illusion. Merging two cultures is risky. Merging two technologies is risky-squared. It’s sensible to be wary at times like this and why I recommend investigating File-Over-App.
November 24, 2024
Coda’s Future Demise
Don’t be shocked if it happens. All things die, eventually.
I predicted Coda’s demise in early 2024. Not the actual date, but the likely eventual demise. I questioned the AI strategy and told the Codans to pump the breaks. But my deeper predictive senses about the future were captured in an article never published. I shelved it because I never got access to Coda Brain, which is increasingly looking like a brain fart instead of the panacea it was touted to be.
At the time, I was subliminally nudged toward great optimism because of the Snowflake deal, followed by silence; there was no apparent access to Coda Brain for months. Today, there is still no access or evident availability for ordinary people like me. Indeed, this is a signal that Coda is becoming less relevant to me and perhaps to others.
There was also that nagging voice whispering in my ear -
File over App… File over App… File over App .
I couldn’t silence this voice then or now. This is a crucial movement we should all consider because anyone reading this post about the future probably has an unhealthy dependence on SaaS. And I’m describing the world at large. I wrote at length about the notion (pun) of a technical underpinning that is more like Web3 and less like Web2.
As powerful, broadly adopted, and respected as it may seem—someday, [Coda] will save its last sentence for me. It may happen while I’m still alive, and the data suggests I will almost certainly see that day occur.
We frequently experience last-ever events. We don’t notice them, but we also don’t anticipate or plan for them. I think we should ponder them more frequently, perhaps even celebrate them like the last time I pumped gasoline for my car.
All things will end. So, Coda’s demise is not a prediction. It’s a [future] fact that hasn’t occurred. This is not to say I’m a doomer. I’m just looking at the data and being rational.
Coda’s Future Demise
Let’s be clear about the term “demise.” I’m using it here in a non-literal sense. It will meet its demise when it becomes irrelevant for me and my teams to continue to use it. Events like this happen long before a company goes out of business. The lucky ones are acquired, but this is often a signal that early adopters will probably be looking for alternatives. The Snowflake deal has been interpreted as a quasi-acquisition, so there’s that.
Whatever you pay annually for SaaS services, your switching cost is about 15x that fee. Do the math. Prove me wrong.
Last week, in a meeting that increasingly exposed the dependencies of a project and the team concerning my development skills, I announced that I was soon going to be hospitalized with major surgery followed by a very long recovery period. I waited just long enough to watch leadership’s blood drain from their faces before adding…
"I don’t know when I’ll be hospitalized or for what, but it will happen. "
When the nervous laughter subsided, I revealed the actuarial data for 72-yr-olds. I’m right about this, and I’m also right about Coda.
Enjoy the ride while it’s the best ride. Soon enough, it will ride like a ’62 Chevy Corvair.