Is it all just vapourware?
A software engineer critiques the current state of AI agent software, labeling much of it as 'vapourware' due to poor user experience and lack of rigorous testing. The author shares a frustrating personal experience with an automation tool that failed to deliver on its promises despite significant costs.
Why it matters
It highlights a growing disconnect between the rapid proliferation of AI-driven developer tools and their actual utility in real-world software engineering workflows.
Maybe I’m just too cynical but it’s really starting to feel like more or less all of this new “AI”/agent software is vapourware. I’ve been trying to take this whole “agentic development” thing seriously and there is just so much friction in this ecosystem it’s absolutely insane. It’s very clear that all this stuff is built by engineers who a) have free access to unlimited tokens and b) have no systematic review or QA process for usability testing or dogfooding their products except on the most straightforward of happy paths.
The hard part of software engineering was never writing the code. Now that the cost of writing code has collapsed almost down to the cost of LLM inference, code is ubiquitous. Everybody has a vibe coded startup and many are great ideas but the execution seems to lack any regard whatsoever for the user experience.
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