The Eternal Sloptember
The article discusses the limitations of AI agents in software development, arguing that they cannot effectively program. While AI can be useful for certain tasks, it often produces subpar results compared to human programmers. The author expresses concern that reliance on AI could lead to a decline in code quality and overall output in organizations.
- ▪AI agents are sophisticated statistical models that mimic programming but cannot program effectively.
- ▪The author believes that while AI is useful for quick prototypes, it falls short of the standards required for software engineering.
- ▪There is a risk that organizations relying on AI will produce more low-quality code, leading to a decline in overall output.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | the singularity is nearer |
| Canonical URL | https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2026/05/24/the-eternal-sloptember.html |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 18:25:34 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T18:37:33.812Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T18:37:33.812Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Eternal Sloptember May 24, 2026 I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model. At first, I rejected this. I bought into the Twitter explanation of status anxiety.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at the singularity is nearer.
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