Quantifying My AWS "Vibes"

I actually laughed out loud when I came across this meme yesterday. With (near to medium term) unfalsifiable bearish takes flying around for non-AI stocks, I sympathize a bit with the complaints about the rise of “vibes” based investing. However, on a personal level, the more I think about it, the more I realize now that the AIs are so much better at modeling all sorts of different scenarios, it is actually easier than ever to quantify your “vibes”. Ever since I decided to stop modeling companies by hand and started just talking (yes, literally) to the AI models for building financial models, I actually feel the AIs have helped me be more grounded with my own “vibes” on forming different hypotheses.

So I have been talking to Claude for the last couple of days to take a fresh look at AWS. Now that building and re-building models for the umpteenth time is easier than ever, I spoke with Claude at length about all the concerns I have about the hyperscaler businesses. I asked Claude to dissect AWS in three different buckets and build the cost estimates in much more granular way than I did before. (A bit of a tangent here, but I recently came to appreciate why talking to models is such a better experience than writing queries to the model. Writing requires you to organize your thoughts and the cognitive load often ends up constraining you from giving the full-range of contexts of where you’re coming from. Speaking is much more natural and even if it’s half-baked gibberish thoughts at times, today’s AIs are smart enough to elicit the key essence of your questions.)

Anyways, I will share the final AWS model (which was built by Claude after two dozen rounds of retries based on my feedback), a guide to navigate it, and the detailed work behind the paywall.

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