This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Dave Sommerville
Before we had the Internet, there was Usenet. Usenet offered email, newsgroups, and the ability to share media and projects over any distance. Aside from the odd hacker and hobbyist, its members had access through university or corporate accounts. Usenet's indelible and exclusive culture created a stable and structured social environment... except for September. Every fall would bring a flood of new and eager students logging in with their university accounts. This would cause ripples in the culture, but they would eventually settle. New netizens would either conform to social norms or abandon the field outright.
Meanwhile, a little company called AOL decided to open the floodgates. They offered a subscription-based service (with free trial) to let the public try out Usenet. Suddenly, anyone with a computer could be part of the net, and many eager and curious people did. The culture faced what felt like a never-ending wave of student users, or the Eternal September.
The tenured users couldn't educate the n00bs fast enough to keep them from washing away the norms of their society. While one might sympathize with the original users’ sense of lost culture; a gatekept, private internet is unimaginable in today's interconnected world. Moreover, this was a loss of culture, not control. Online societies influenced every corner of the globe, but an elite group of academics and professionals continued to maintain the technical foundations.
Learning to program required mastery of dense concepts and access to expensive equipment. Over time, costs dropped and interfaces became more user-friendly. New barriers have appeared, however, chiefly the growing complexity of the field. The knowledge, access, and resource required grew in complexity in turn. Companies, not lone coders, became the engines of major innovation. Yet the tools also grew in strength and cohesion, with tools now expanding our agency as students and professionals in never before seen ways, promising a new wave of culture and control.
Eternal September, authentically, is upon us. I don't mean vibe coding or the promises of big tech. I mean using LLMs and other AI systems as tools for learning, summarization, generation, and more. This isn't about getting the robot to do your homework(although AI will let you sail the C's to a degree). This is about learning, creating, and deploying with unprecedented efficiency. It’s not a story of AI’s power, it's a story of what the curious will do with it.
As a student, AI gave me both a tutor and a judge. As a creator, it offers automation and summarization. I’m talking about human-first, human-augmentation. AI has also wasted my time, sent me down rabbit holes, fabricated truths, and created scaling issues. Without active involvement, your tools can be as harmful as they are helpful. A junior developer who relies too heavily on an LLM for simple tasks may develop a false sense of confidence and lack the foundational knowledge required for more complex problem-solving. It's not about doing more with the same time; it's about making sure that the time you spend is on true learning, not just prompt engineering. For those who are driven and curious, though, the barriers to learning have never been lower. Small, focused teams can now create meaningful innovations with less dependence on profit or scale.
Eternal September embodies the creed of life long learning and continual improvement.
For me, this article marks the kick off of a personal initiative in the world of LLMs and AI Agents. My goal is to create a system of optimized AI tools, but I want to do it slowly and deliberately while maximizing my learning along the way. I intend to examine the technology of AI in a rigorous but holistic sense before releasing my personalized AI agent. I won't go into the technical side of my plans in this article.
You can find real-time details on my Project Board at DS Code
Or you can read my evil origin story here
I don't know what shape this initiative is going to take long-term because the nature of it is to grow and respond to the content it covers. This is just another step in the endless journey of learning.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Dave Sommerville
Dave Sommerville | Sciencx (2025-09-29T13:16:36+00:00) Eternal September: Learning for the Life of it. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/09/29/eternal-september-learning-for-the-life-of-it/
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