August 9, 2026
Vaporware or just hot air?
Is it all just vapourware?
AI helper promises magic, users say it can barely make it past the login
TLDR: A developer said an AI tool that promised to automate busywork burned through $20 and still struggled with basic setup, raising fresh questions about whether these products actually work. In the comments, readers split between “the tech is real but oversold” and “this whole craze is launching before it has a clear purpose.”
A developer’s rant about AI “agent” tools not living up to the hype turned into a full-blown comment-section showdown. The complaint was painfully relatable: sign up for a tool that promises to handle the annoying parts of building software, only to get trapped in login issues, endless setup, and a mysteriously vanishing $20 budget before anything useful even happens. For readers outside the tech bubble, the promise here is simple: tell the software what you want, and it does the boring work for you. The reality, according to this post, was more like paying for a personal assistant who spends all day looking for the stapler.
And the community had thoughts. One camp said the real scandal isn’t that the technology is fake, but that companies are forcing flimsy uses onto it to justify sky-high prices. Another argued this is the same old tech cycle: big promises, fuzzy language, and the awkward detail that the product launches before anyone can clearly explain why normal people need it. But not everyone joined the pile-on. One commenter pushed back, warning that judging the entire field by ONA—a cloud tool recently acquired by OpenAI—is unfair. Then came the comic relief: one reader admitted they clicked expecting something about vaporwave music, only to be hit with yet another argument about AI. Honestly? That may have been the most universally understood reaction in the whole thread.
Key Points
- •The article argues that many AI agent software products create significant user friction despite broad marketing claims.
- •The author says the falling cost of code generation has led to many startups and tools with abundant code output but weak execution and user experience.
- •The article uses ONA as a case study of an agentic development product the author tested.
- •According to the article, the author could not log in on ONA’s desktop app, then used the web version and connected a project successfully after multiple redirects.
- •The author says ONA consumed nearly $20 in compute credits while attempting to retrieve Linear todos, leading them to conclude the tool added friction instead of reducing it.