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The Great Zipper of Capitalism - by Scott Werner

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On Pizzas, CSVs, and Building for Markets That Don't Exist Yet

Scott WernerFeb 22, 2026ShareJim Barksdale, not the guy from The Wire (that was Avon), the Netscape guy. Before your time maybe. Definitely before mine in any meaningful sense. He said once that basically there are only two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling.

That’s it. That’s the whole theory of business. Everything is either getting stitched together or pulled apart. Cable TV bundles channels. iTunes unbundles albums into songs and Spotify bundles them back up. Newsletters unbundle journalism into individuals. Round and round. The great zipper of capitalism, forever zipping and unzipping.

It’s been on my mind lately because I think I accidentally discovered an unbundling opportunity, and it might be a big opportunity for others of you out there also dealing with Claude Code Psychosis (or I guess maybe make it worse…).

But first I’ve got to tell you how it all started.

Sixty People and a Lot of Pizza

In May 2024, I noticed nobody was talking about building things with AI in Ruby.

This was weird. Ruby people (“strange people”) are usually talking or blogging about everything. That’s like one of the defining characteristics of Ruby people. They at least talked about Web 3. But the Ruby + AI conversation was just... empty.

So I figured I’d try to get some people together. A happy hour. Low stakes. We booked a space at a bar in New York, posted about it, hoped maybe 10 or 20 people would show up so we could commiserate about the state of things and drink beer.

I had prepared for “a handful of people making small talk near a plate of nachos.” And so through no deliberate action I was now the organizer. The guy whose name is on the thing. The one people email when they have questions like “When is the next one?”

That happy hour eventually turned into what is now Artificial Ruby. A monthly meetup and community in New York focused on the intersection of Ruby and AI. With talks from people all around the world. Almost two years in now. And it has given me a much better appreciation for the Programmers’ Credo.

caption...Nobody warns you about what running a community event actually involves. Or maybe they do and you don’t listen, because it seems like it should be simple. Get a room. Tell people when. Show up.

But then you actually do it. And you discover that it involves managing RSVPs across platforms. Syncing your attendance list with your mailing list so the people who come to events also get your emails and the people who read your emails know about events. Writing social media posts promoting the event. Writing social media posts after the event. Keeping track of who comes regularly and who signed up once and vanished. Estimating attendance so you know how much food to order, which is its own special art form because the conversion rate from “RSVP yes” to “actually shows up” fluctuates based on weather, day of week, season, vibes, proximity to holidays, and probably the phase of the moon.

You know the feeling. It’s 6:10 PM. Doors opened at 6:00. Five people have arrived. You have fifteen pizzas. You are standing in a room that can hold eighty people and it is echoing. You check your phone. You check the RSVP list. Forty-seven people said yes. Five are here.

(They’re on the subway. Or at least that’s what the two who texted you said. Everyone will arrive in a wave at 6:25 and suddenly you won’t have enough pizza. This is the way.)

So the obvious first move would be to set up a Zapier integration, right? Luma handles RSVPs. Mailchimp handles the newsletter. Zap connects them. Solved.

But I looked at Zapier, and I looked at my problem, and I just felt exhausted. That kind of exhausted where learning a new tool to automate a tedious task feels more tedious than just... doing the tedious task. You know the feeling. You do the math in your head: time to learn Zapier, time to configure it, time to debug it when it inevitably does something wrong, versus just exporting a CSV from Luma and importing it into Mailchimp.

So of course I kept doing the CSV thing and the pain kept accumulating. The attendance guessing. The “did this person actually show up or just RSVP” mystery. The social media posts I’d write at 11 PM the night before because I forgot again. Every month, the same friction, in the same places, getting slightly more annoying each time.

And so at some point I started building something. Just for me. Just locally. A little app running on localhost that talked to the Luma API and the Mailchimp API and did the sync automatically and, while it was at it, started tracking some things the CSV shuffle never could. Who opens the newsletter. Who actually shows up versus who just RSVPs.

I used it like that for months. Just me, on my laptop, localhost:3000, red circle favicon, solving my own problem.

Last weekend Claude a