GoKawiilCornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, The Reverse of a Framed Painting (1670)
Anyone who’s not been living under a rock knows that we’re in full peptide mania.
For the uninitiated, “peptides” are drugs which are made of short chains of amino acids, unlike most drugs which are small molecules. The difference is mostly academic except that you can’t take peptides orally for the most part, as they’re just protein chains, and your stomach is very good at digesting protein and turning it back into amino acids which your body has other uses for!
So peptides have to be either sprayed into your nose, or injected. Hence the (probably apocryphal) stories of “peptide parties” in SF where people go around injecting each other.
Anyway. Trying to buy gray market peptides is now a strange and difficult experience. With the advent of agentic AI coding tools, anyone can make a very pretty, convincing-looking website. Here’s a popular one, Qingdao Sigma, a brand you’ll see recommended on a lot of websites:
They have zillions of products and at incredibly low prices as well. Apparently all lab-tested, they take credit card (usually a good sign, although it’s understandable that companies selling gray market peptides might not want to), and good reviews on TrustPilot. Let’s click on that green banner.
Huh, those reviews do look pretty good. There’s even one right there from someone in Germany, which is great – I’m in Berlin at the moment. (I had hoped they were using geotargeting to dynamically show the user’s country, but it’s actually just a review about Germany.)
But wait a second. I’m not on TrustPilot; I’m still on the QSC website, just on a page that looks like TrustPilot. These guys don’t actually have a page on TrustPilot at all. And these reviews are all AI-generated:
No worries, you think – I’ll just have a look at a review website to see what suppliers have a good track record. Here’s CompoundTalk, a review site I came across while researching for this piece. Looks pretty modern:
But look closer. The trained eye, weary of vibe coded designs, will see Claude Code’s aesthetic fingerprint all over this. First of all, the text is way too small! Every time I’m working with Claude I have to tell it to make the text bigger. Anthropic’s models obviously have pin-sharp eyesight. Some of the text here is 8pt!
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