Is it all just vapourware?
The article discusses the author's skepticism about new AI and agent software, feeling that it is often vapourware with poor execution and user experience. The author tried ONA, a platform that promises to automate the software development process, but encountered numerous issues, including login problems and inefficient use of resources. The author believes that these companies' marketing is overblown and that their products often create more work for users rather than simplifying the development process.
- ▪The author is skeptical about new AI and agent software, feeling that it is often vapourware.
- ▪The author tried ONA, a platform that promises to automate the software development process, but encountered numerous issues.
- ▪The author believes that the marketing for these products is often overblown and that they can create more work for users rather than simplifying the development process.
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Record
| Original publisher | Kira Howe |
| Canonical URL | https://kirahowe.com/2026/aug/8/is-it-all-just-vapourware |
| Publication time | Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:03:43 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-09T21:25:43.905Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-09T21:25:43.905Z |
| 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
Is it all just vapourware?August 8, 2026/3 min readMaybe 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.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Kira Howe.
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