Irresponsible AI Reading List - September 2025

This month's Irresponsible AI Reading List for September 2025 documents the cleanup economy. The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes reveals an emerging service industry: experienced developers hired to repair codebases generated by AI coding assistants. "Vibe coding" produces superficially functional code lacking architecture, maintainability, or understanding - technical debt at industrial scale. Related coverage in Vibe Coding Cleanup as a Service describes consulting firms positioning themselves explicitly as fixers for AI-generated disasters.

The irony is exquisite, as captured in Greatest irony of the AI age: humans being automated out of work, only to be hired back to clean up the mess left by the very AI that replaced them. We're witnessing a perfect distillation of the AI hype cycle: companies fire developers to save money with AI tools, those tools create unmaintainable messes, companies hire contractors at higher rates to fix what functional teams could have built properly in the first place. Value destroyed, wealth transferred upward to AI vendors and consulting firms, workers degraded into precarious cleanup crews.

This represents a maturation of patterns visible all year: June's cognitive debt, July's labour discipline, August's catastrophic failures now crystallize into a stable economic structure. The AI industry isn't replacing work - it's reorganizing labour markets to maximize extraction whilst degrading skills, stability, and institutional knowledge. September's reading list shows us the future they're building: not automation, but deliberate chaos requiring perpetual crisis management.

As always, the Quantum Fax Machine Propellor Hat Key will guide your browsing. Enjoy!

Irresponsible AI Reading List - September 2025

Links

The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes

Vibe Coding Cleanup as a Service

Greatest irony of the AI age: Humans being increasingly hired to clean AI slop