Off Autopilot
Curated, human-written articles about agentic coding
68 followers
Curated, human-written articles about agentic coding
68 followers
Agentic coding discourse is drowning in sponsored and slop content. Off Autopilot is a weekly newsletter curating high-signal, human-written articles about agentic coding
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Hey all.
I don't think I've ever seen this amount of noise to signal content ratio for any other topic as I see for agentic coding. The amount of slop (sponsored slop, hype/doom rage-baiting, ai-generated slop) is unbelievable.
My bet is that figuring out agentic coding workflows will be a very long, unsexy process done by devs who actually use agents in real-world scenarios and document their findings, not by corporations whose incentive is to sell more tokens to companies.
I spend some time each week sifting through mountains of garbage to find original human-written articles about real-world applications of agents. I decided to make a newsletter out of it. Hope you find it helpful.
Grabbed the RSS, thanks. The GPT Zero + manual pass makes sense, though GPT Zero tends to flag heavily-edited human writing as AI too — when the detector and the HN/Reddit social signal disagree on a piece, which one wins, or does a borderline one just get cut? And does the feed carry the full curated picks or just the issue announcements?
@noctis06 social signal filters out most of the ai stuff. I then discard articles that are close to 100% ai-written in GPT Zero, not mixed. The point is to discard low-effort "generate a post about X" stuff. I want to make sure I'm reading real human thoughts (even if checked for grammar with ai afterward). But most articles are 100% human on GPT Zero, tbh
Full curated picks
makes sense, using GPT Zero to discard the ~100% AI stuff rather than trying to score everything is a pragmatic line to draw. Where I'd worry is false positives, since GPT Zero flags plenty of genuinely human technical writing as AI, especially clean edited prose. Do you have a manual override when a piece you rate highly gets flagged, or is the detector a hard gate? And good to know the feed carries the full curated picks, that's the part that makes subscribing worth it over just the announcements.
The signal/noise framing is the right call — most agentic-coding content right now is either token-selling hype or AI-generated filler dressed up as a tutorial. How do you actually filter for 'human-written' each week: is it you manually reading through the firehose, or do you have heuristics/tooling to pre-screen candidates? And is there a public archive or RSS so I can pull past issues into my own reading workflow, or is it email-only for now?
@noctis06
I have an agentic workflow that finds candidates based on the topic and positive social signal on forums (hn, lobsters, reddit, etc..)
Then I go through each and check with GPT Zero + manually
Public archive - https://offautopilot.substack.com/archive
RSS - https://offautopilot.substack.com/feed
Happy to find this project.
The amount of irrelevant and destructive noise is annoying. I am quite tired of reading "you're cooked", "you're replaceable", "one prompt will change everything," blah blah.
Being a software engineer, this is a fascinating tool that we all need to learn meticulously, see problems, disadvantages, weak points and learn how to trick them and make our solutions better.
Another problem I have is that it's annoying to read an AI-generated article. I've unsubscribed from a few tech bloggers I've been reading so far because of the AI-slop smell in their text.
I like that this project combines both - top-picked relevant articles for agentic coding and double-verified that those articles have a human touch and human deep thinking, not like "make an article about agentic coding with 1000 words, make no mistakes".
The noise problem in agentic coding content is real - half of what circulates is vendor marketing dressed as tutorials or pure hype. We spend actual team hours triaging what's worth reading vs what's just token farming. The human-written constraint is exactly the right filter. Subscribed.
The amount of agentic coding content has gotten noisy fast, so a human-curated filter actually sounds useful. I’d rather read a few real workflow notes than another recycled “AI will change coding” post.
Agree with the problem, it's almost as depressing as the sheer amount of AI-written comments on PH 😂
Will be one of your readers!
@ferdi_sigona ai comments are basically everywhere. Lobsters is a good exception. And HN is not terribly bad as most ai comments get downvoted