The Library
Killed Audible in 30 minutes.
Ethan went to the gym. when he came back, he had a complete audiobook system that replaced Audible. built entirely by an AI agent in 30 minutes. no human involvement.
that's the whole pitch. an AI built a production-quality audiobook pipeline, from PDF to your ears, while a human was doing bicep curls.
how it works
the pipeline starts with a PDF. the system extracts the text, chunks it into chapters, and sends each chapter through Edge TTS, Microsoft's free text-to-speech API. the audio files come back as high-quality narration, not robot voice, surprisingly natural for a free service.
the generated audio gets served as an RSS feed running on port 8282 as a launchd service on the Mac mini. Ethan subscribes to the feed in Apple Podcasts. that's it. each book shows up as a podcast with chapters as episodes. standard podcast player features work: playback speed, sleep timer, bookmarks, sync across devices.
the library
64 books and counting. Steve Jobs, Meditations, Zero to One, The 48 Laws of Power, Blitzscaling, Project Hail Mary, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Art of War. biographies, strategy, business, sci-fi, philosophy. every book ingested as searchable markdown chunks with full-text search across the entire collection.
that's the part people miss. this isn't just audiobooks. every book is broken into structured chunks that the AI agent can search and cross-reference. ask "what would Steve Jobs think about this product decision?" and the agent pulls relevant passages from the Steve Jobs biography, cross-references with The Innovator's Dilemma, and gives you a synthesized answer grounded in actual text. ask "what do Dalio and Munger agree on about decision-making?" and it searches Principles and Poor Charlie's Almanack simultaneously.
the library is a knowledge base that happens to also play audiobooks.
why Apple Podcasts
Audible's app is fine but it's a locked ecosystem. $15/month for one book. this system costs nothing. Edge TTS is free. zero cost per book, and it uses an app already on every device. no new app to install, no subscription, no DRM. the RSS feed means any podcast app works.
the moment
i was listening to a book and realized i wanted to store the information, have it readily available, be able to revisit specific chapters without scrubbing through an app that fights you at every turn. i was paying $15 a month for the privilege of a locked ecosystem that made it harder to actually learn from what i was reading. how could AI do this?
the 30-minute part
this is the part that matters. Ultron (the AI agent) identified the need, designed the pipeline, wrote the code, set up the launchd service, generated the first book, and had the RSS feed live before Ethan finished his workout. no prompting, no back-and-forth, no "can you also add..." iterations. the agent understood the goal and shipped it.
that's the difference between a chatbot and an agent. a chatbot answers questions. an agent builds systems while you're at the gym.
why SaaS is dead
Audible's entire value is convenience. a locked-down app with DRM that lets you listen to one book a month from their catalog, and you can't even search inside it.
we built something that does more, for free, in half an hour. any book, fully searchable, with an AI that can navigate it conversationally ("skip to where Jobs talks about the iPhone"). and it runs on our hardware. no subscription.
cost per book on Audible: $14.95. cost per book with this setup: $0.00.
every SaaS that's just a wrapper around a commodity, storage, TTS, search, task management, is getting replaced by AI agents that assemble the same thing from free APIs at a fraction of the cost. the ones that survive will have real moats, actual proprietary data or network effects. the rest are wrappers about to get unwrapped.