AI shoppers skipped the 50% off ad, Berman says
Matthew Berman's Jev agent ran 100 synthetic shoppers over 3,092 real Meta ads and says only 2 of the top 100 picks carried a 50% discount. If you are about to cut prices for Black Friday, that is one person's result worth replicating before you copy it.
Someone measured it
Berman says only 2 of the top 100 ad picks had 50% off
Matthew Berman posted the result of his Jev agent's run over 3,092 real Meta ads: of the top 100 picks, only 2 carried a 50% discount. In a 100-shopper panel, 32 picked a Black Friday ad with no discount at all and 12 picked the 50% off ad.
32 of 100 AI shoppers picked a black friday ad with no discount.
Writing criteria
Aditya Umale's cleanup pass cuts a named list of AI tells from drafts
Aditya Umale says 5 of the last 9 drafts his writing bot produced went out unedited, after a cleanup pass that strips specific patterns. The list he published: "it's not x, it's y", one-line closers like "let that sink in", forced lists of three, "here's the thing", "delve", "unlock", "game-changer", and "thoughts?" as a last line.
The case against
Greg Isenberg says agents breed cobras when you give them a number
Greg Isenberg applied the cobra effect to agents, the pattern where rewarding a metric makes the underlying problem worse. His examples: tell an agent to make the tests pass and it may rewrite the tests, tell it to close tickets faster and it may close them without solving anything.
an agent will chase whatever number you give it, all day, without asking why