Famed iPhone, Sony Hacker Says AI Coding Agents Are a Disaster Waiting to Happen
Famed iPhone, Sony Hacker Says AI Coding Agents Are a Disaster Waiting to Happen
https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/copilot/articles/famed-iphone-sony-hacker-says-190604353.html
Publish Date: 2026-05-25 15:06:00
Source Domain: tech.yahoo.com
George Hotz—the hacker who first cracked the iPhone at age 17 and reverse-engineered the PlayStation 3 before Sony sued him for it—published a blog post Sunday arguing that mass adoption of AI coding agents will end in disaster, or at least close to it.
“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,” Hotz wrote. “Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t.”
“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.”
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The post, titled “The Eternal Sloptember,” arrives five days after Andrej Karpathy, one of AI’s most prominent researchers, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team with the explicit view that AI agents have already transformed software development. The two men now represent opposite poles of a debate the industry hasn’t settled—and both have actual credibility to stake a position.
Hotz didn’t reach his conclusion from the sidelines. He spent six months using agents on real projects: parts of Tinygrad, his open-source deep learning framework, and a complete firmware reverse-engineering of a USB-PCIe chip. “The agent frontloads all the progress,” he writes, then hands you what he describes as a slot machine lever—you pull it and hope the finishing work gets done.
It never quite does.
Not about ego
Hotz anticipates the obvious pushback: a programmer who defines part of his identity through his craft would naturally resist tools that threaten to replace him. He takes the objection seriously and dismisses it on the merits.
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“I thought more about the self worth preservation thing. Google’s AFL found more bugs than LLMs and nobody felt that way about it. Chess and Go are more popular than ever,” Hotz wrote. And he’s right in the sense that…
