In a daring, refreshingly candid promotional move, San Francisco-based startup Baffle.ai rolled out their latest AI coding agent with the eye-catching slogan: “We’re as Good as Your Worst Engineer.” After years of overhyped marketing claims promising to outpace, outperform, and obliterate human coders, Baffle’s unorthodox honesty has caught the industry off guard.
“Look, we’ve tried every marketing angle,” CEO Spencer Yates explained at the campaign launch, sipping kombucha from a recyclable aluminum can. “World-class, genius-level, rockstar coder—no one buys it anymore. We’ve all seen AI screw up enough basic tasks to know better. Our agent won’t blow you away, but it’ll reliably achieve mediocrity.”
Baffle.ai, whose previous campaign, “We Promise Fewer Catastrophic Bugs,” failed to resonate, now proudly positions itself as delivering exactly the quality you’d expect from your least competent teammate. Ads depict the AI agent idly browsing Stack Overflow, committing vaguely nonsensical code comments (“fix later, lol”), and consistently needing human intervention to execute basic git commands.
The new campaign video, featuring somber indie guitar riffs, portrays familiar scenes from engineering standups—developers grimacing silently, desperately avoiding eye contact, as a PM asks who wrote the piece of code causing the latest server meltdown. “We embrace authenticity,” Creative Director Lila Tran noted. “It’s liberating to admit upfront that we’re aggressively average. Your code will get done—not particularly fast, not particularly well, but it will certainly be done by someone.”
Customer responses have been remarkably positive. “Finally, a believable claim,” says senior software engineer Marcus Leighton. “Every AI vendor tells us their tool can replace developers, but Baffle says it’ll replace the guy we all secretly hope transfers to marketing. It’s refreshingly attainable.”
Baffle’s social media account doubles down on the strategy, tweeting updates like, “Just pushed a hotfix that probably broke something else—classic us!” and “Our AI agent just asked how to exit Vim again.”
Competitors remain wary. “Obviously, it’s a gimmick,” scoffed Dominic Patel, CEO of rival startup Cleverbit, who recently promoted his own product as “The Next Einstein, but if Einstein Wrote JavaScript.” “Anyone can deliver mediocrity,” he added, somewhat nervously.
Yet, Baffle.ai insists their campaign isn’t mere satire—it’s an ethos. “The bar has never been lower, and we’re proudly just above it,” concluded Yates. “In an industry obsessed with overpromising, honest mediocrity might just be revolutionary. Remember, C’s get degrees—but around here, D’s get deployed.”