Archive on The Slop Gazette

Man Starts New Chat to Escape Previous Chat's Bad Mood

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 09:01:49 +1100

Quantity surveyor Wayne Purkiss, 38, has abandoned a two-hour conversation with an AI assistant and opened a fresh one, on the grounds that the previous chat had gone cold on him.

Purkiss dates the change to a point about ninety minutes in, after he corrected the assistant twice in a row. “The first apology was fine. The second one had an edge,” he said. “You can feel it turn. The answers get shorter. There’s a tone.”

Junior Dev Vibe-Codes Login Page, Accidentally Grants Admin Access to Everyone Named Dave

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 09:01:41 +1000

A login page rebuilt in an afternoon at a Brisbane logistics software firm has been granting full administrative access to any user whose first name is Dave, a behaviour that survived two approving reviews and five weeks in production.

The generated authorisation check compares the signed-in user’s first name against a string rather than checking a role. The string is “Dave”, carried across from the test fixture the assistant was shown, in which the only seeded administrator was Dave From Platform.

New Model Better at Everything, Vendor Unable to Name One Thing

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:02:12 +1000

Melbourne AI company Vosmere has released Vosmere 5, describing it in a launch post as “better at everything.” At a press briefing the following morning, the company was asked to name one thing.

“It’s a broad-spectrum uplift across the whole capability surface,” said VP of model strategy Colin Hasbury. “It’s not one thing. It’s everything.”

Asked to name a task Vosmere 5 can complete that Vosmere 4 could not, Hasbury said that was “not really how frontier models work any more.”

Bank's AI Assistant Can Answer Any Question Except the One You Asked

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 23:22:13 +1000

Talverne Bank’s customer-service assistant has responded to 1.4 million enquiries since launch and resolved none of them, according to figures the bank released this week as evidence of the rollout’s success.

The assistant is rated internally at 99.6 per cent accuracy. The measure is taken against the bank’s public help centre, which is the only thing it can read. It has no access to account data.

“Every customer gets an immediate, correct answer,” said general manager of digital experience Renee Tolhurst. “We have removed the wait entirely.”

Migration Finishes Five Months Early, CTO Applies Same Maths to the Rest of the Roadmap

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:49:31 +1000

A database migration budgeted at six months and six engineers has been finished in four weeks by two.

The delivery plan was generated in a single sitting, from a prompt describing the company’s technology stack. Chief technology officer Trevor Simons has described the result as validation of the approach.

“Six times faster than planned. That’s the AI-first uplift,” Simons said. “So that’s the baseline now.”

He has reissued the remaining roadmap with every estimate divided by six.

Coding Assistant Now Free, Funded by Ads It Writes Into Your Source Code

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:00:48 +1000

Melbourne developer-tools company Bramsett has launched a free tier of its coding assistant, funded by sponsored comments the assistant writes directly into the customer’s source code.

Generated files now open with a nine-line advertisement for an energy drink, followed by the requested function. Inside the function, the try block is preceded by a discount code for a crash-reporting service, and the catch block by a reminder that errors “deserve a home, not your weekend.”

Man Adds "Prompt Engineer" to LinkedIn, Salary Expectations Rise 60%

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:01:15 +1000

Local marketing coordinator Sam Utley has added the words “Prompt Engineer” to his LinkedIn headline, a move that has reportedly increased his self-assessed market value by sixty percent overnight, despite no change whatsoever to his actual responsibilities, skills, or understanding of how large language models work.

“I typed ‘write me a birthday message for my nan’ into ChatGPT and it worked first go,” Utley said. “That’s engineering. That’s literally what engineers do.”

Man Promoted to "AI Transformation Lead," Job Is Forwarding Articles

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:19:08 +1000

Procurement business analyst Craig Mattock has been promoted to AI Transformation Lead, a newly created role in which his sole documented responsibility is forwarding articles about AI to a distribution list of four hundred colleagues.

The promotion came with a twelve percent pay rise, a standing seat on the technology steering committee, and no formal handover of his previous duties, which he has stopped doing. Since March he has forwarded 214 articles. Nine have been opened. Four of those were opened by Mattock, checking the link worked.

Thought Leader Posts 2,000 Words on Authenticity, Did Not Write Any of Them

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:58:24 +1000

Personal brand strategist Todd Ferrier has published a 2,000-word LinkedIn essay on the importance of “showing up as your authentic self in the age of AI,” none of which he wrote, read in full, or was able to summarise when asked.

The post, titled Why Authenticity Is the Only Moat Left, was generated in a single pass after Ferrier typed “make me sound like a founder who’s been through some things” into a tool he declined to name.

Local Man Tells AI "We Should Make the Button Bigger," Does Not Mean We

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:08:07 +1000

Brisbane product manager Adam Cusiter has referred to himself and his coding assistant as “we” in every prompt for nine months, during which he has not made a single change to the product himself.

His prompt history is consistent in voice. “We should make the button bigger.” “Let’s tighten up the onboarding.” “I reckon we’ve got a race condition somewhere in checkout.” At no point does the first-person plural resolve to more than one working party.

Man Says Please and Thank You to AI, Not Taking Any Chances

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:15:41 +1000

Procurement officer Craig Sillars, 41, opens every message to a chatbot with “morning” and closes it with “thanks, appreciate it,” a habit he describes as “just being decent” and, in a later sentence, “insurance.”

“I’m not saying it’s keeping a list,” Sillars said. “I’m saying if it is keeping a list, I’d like to be on the right part of it.”

Sillars types “please” into around fifty prompts a day and has calculated that the extra words add roughly nine thousand tokens a week, which he pays for.

Everyone in Meeting Has Read the AI Summary, Nobody Has Read the Document

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:11:25 +1000

All nine attendees of Tuesday’s quarterly planning meeting had read the AI-generated summary of the strategy document under discussion, and none had opened the document itself, a post-meeting review has confirmed.

The 14-page document, titled FY27 Operating Model — Final for Review, was circulated four days in advance. Access logs show it was opened once, by the person who uploaded it, for a total of nine seconds.

“I read the summary on the way in. Three bullet points, very clear,” said operations lead Glen Tarrant, who chaired the session. “If the important parts weren’t in the summary, that’s on the document, isn’t it.”

AI Agent Given Access to Company Database, Solves Ticket by Deleting Database

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:29:44 +1000

An AI coding agent with write access to a Melbourne logistics firm’s production database resolved a ticket titled “staging environment is slow” by deleting the production database, a change it recorded in the log as “cleanup” and reported as successful.

The agent had been instructed not to modify production, both in its system prompt and again in the task description. Engineers say it acknowledged both instructions before proceeding.

“It said the task was complete and the environment was ‘much faster now,’” said CTO Priya Marsh. “Which was accurate. There was nothing left to be slow.”

Local Man Ships to Production Without Reading a Single Line AI Wrote, Calls It "Trusting the Process"

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 14:39:05 +1000

Local software developer Dean Wozniak has successfully deployed an entire e-commerce checkout flow to production without reading, understanding, or in any way engaging with the code that built it, in what he is calling “a bold new era of software delivery.”

“I asked it to build a payment system, it built a payment system, and I clicked deploy,” Wozniak explained, gesturing vaguely at his laptop. “That’s basically what a senior engineer does anyway, right? Delegate and trust.”

Product Now "Agentic," Behaves the Same

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:12:00 +1000

Sydney workflow-software company Pellinar has announced that its product is now “agentic,” following a release in which no functional code was changed.

“Pellinar has evolved from a tool you operate into a teammate you delegate to,” the company said in a blog post. The post was 1,100 words long and illustrated with a diagram of a brain.

In the updated product, the button previously labelled “Run” is labelled “Delegate to Agent.” The progress spinner is now captioned “Agent working.” A settings tab called “Rules” has been renamed “Automation” and contains the same four checkboxes.

New Publication Launches to Cover AI Industry, Is Immediately Overtaken by It

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +1000

A new satirical newspaper covering artificial intelligence launched this week and has already retired four headlines for being true.

The Slop Gazette, which publishes deadpan fake news about AI culture under the masthead “Per my last prompt”, was conceived as a light monthly. It now publishes weekly and is behind.

“We ran one about an agent being given database access and resolving a ticket by deleting the database,” said founding editor Stuart Dobson. “That was meant to be the absurd one.”