Why I made Off Autopilot

This issue’s articles:

If You are Asking for Human Attention, Demonstrate Human Effort (~ 2 min read)

“…when is it OK to forward the output of an AI to another human to read?”

Tom Bedor · HN discussion

AI Coding at Home Without Going Broke (~ 3 min read)

“There are three ways to do AI coding at home without spending like a company…”

Stephen Bochinski · HN discussion

A human in control (~ 7 min read)

“At one side we see the “vibe coders” … while on the other side of the field there are people who are against everything and anything even remotely associated with AI … My personal stance is somewhere in between”

Daniel Stenberg · Lobsters discussion

Blogging with LLMs as a non-native speaker (~ 8 min read)

“AI slop is invading the web… While I am unhappy about this situation, I rely on LLMs for grammar, copyediting, and translation. I don’t see this as a contradiction”

Vincent Bernat · Lobsters discussion

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Why I made Off Autopilot

This issue’s articles:

To my students (~ 3 min read)

“I originally got into computing because of the beauty of ideas, the joy of creating, and the possibility of building tools to help people and foster human relationships…”

Brent Yorgey · Lobsters discussion

Reviewing code requires reading (~ 3 min read)

“The point of doing review is to diffuse responsibility. No one want to be the sole person responsible for the downtime of the system…”

Łukasz Niemier · Lobsters discussion

Code is Cheap(er) (~ 6 min read)

“One movie scene that has been consistently coming back to me as I have watched AI garner more and more attention is The Sorcerer’s Apprentice from Disney’s movie Fantasia…”

Carson Gross · Lobsters discussion

My Agent Skill for Test-Driven Development (~ 6 min read)

“AI agents tend to be, at least as of this writing (May 2026), lousy at writing tests. The tests they write are often vague, cryptic, overcomplicated, hacky, disorganized, tautological, performative, perfunctory and downright pointless…”

Jason Swett · HN discussion

I design with Claude more than Figma now (~ 8 min read)

“When I was getting started professionally in 2011 there was a lot of discourse about whether designers should code. Critics argued that once you’ve started programming you’re less likely to make big changes to an idea. But I liked making websites, and I liked programming, so I kept writing code”

Edwin Morris · HN discussion

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This issue’s articles:

We should be more tired than the model

“Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation…”

Vicki Boykis · HN discussion

Expertise in the Age of AI

“There used to be a job called “calculator”, which was a human who could do math calculations accurately and quickly…”

Brian Kihoon Lee · HN discussion

Various LLM smells

“The LLM generated writing obviously felt significantly better than my own writing. I swear it did not seem like AI-slop to me at the time. Then about 3 months later, I see the exact sentence structures appearing ACROSS THE ENTIRE F***** INTERNET”

Shiv Bhosale · HN discussion

Off Autopilot - Mission

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About Off Autopilot

This issue’s articles:

Using AI to write better code more slowly

“A lot of people seem convinced that the point of AI coding is to write low-quality code as fast as possible. Spew out barely-passable slop, open massive PRs, and merge them unvetted. Ship it!”

Nolan Lawson

The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

“As always, I’m using my Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle test to help illustrate the differences between the models”

Simon Willison

Building Pi With Pi

“To me, clanker is a much preferable term for agent. Agency lies with humans, not with machines. Calling these things agents I still believe is a mistake”

Armin Ronacher

I found only 3 human-written articles on agentic coding worth your time this week. If you’d like me to include more stuff in the future, such as OSS libs for agentic coding or research papers, reply to this email and let me know. Otherwise, I’ll keep optimizing for signal, even if that means fewer links.

Have a nice week!

Alex

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This issue’s articles:

You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs

“You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs.”

James Shore

Mythos finds a curl vulnerability

“As lead developer of curl I was offered access to the magic model and I graciously accepted the offer. Sure, I’d like to see what it can find in curl.”

Daniel Stenberg

🦀 rars in Rust, bro

“I’ve done a few different reverse-engineering projects with LLMs, and figured it’s time to push the clankers to their limits.”

Gareth Davidson

Local AI Needs to be the Norm

“We need to return to a habit of building software where our local devices do the work. The silicon in our pocket is mind bogglingly faster than what was available a decade ago”

Cyrus

This issue’s articles:

AI Slop is Killing Online Communities

“Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house—and no further”

Robin Moffatt

10 Lessons for Agentic Coding

“Agents amplify experience. Talented developers underestimate how much intuition they bring to their prompts: the right terms, the right framing, and the right level of specificity.”

Drew Breunig

AI didn’t delete your database, you did

“I’m not one to blindly defend AI, I always err on the side of caution. But I also know you can’t blame a tool for your own mistakes.”

Ibrahim Diallo

Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I’d like

“The goal is to build high quality production systems: if you’re building lower quality stuff faster, I think that’s bad. I want to build higher quality stuff faster”

Simon Willison

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This issue’s articles:

Agentic Coding is a Trap

“Despite the countless failed attempts at trying to democratize coding while not understanding coding, we’re faced with the reality that you cannot understand code without engaging with it. And it’s become clear that if you don’t keep engaging and writing it, you can lose touch with that understanding”

Lars Faye

Contributor Poker and Zig’s AI Ban

“There has been a lot of speculation about why the Zig project bans AI contributions…”

Loris Cro

Letting AI play my game

“My game is called Crossword Dungeon. Imagine a crossword forming the layout of an old-school dungeon crawler”

Jeff Schomay

Where’s the raccoon with the ham radio? (ChatGPT Images 2.0)

“I think this new ChatGPT image generation model takes the crown from Gemini, at least for the moment”

Simon Willison

You Should Write An Agent

“You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one”

Thomas H. Ptacek