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Slop is not necessarily the future

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Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#31

Post by seamossfet »

I find most developers fall into one of two camps:

1. You treat your code as a means to an end to make a product for a user.

2. You treat the code itself as your craft, with the product being a vector for your craft.

The people who typically have the most negative things to say about AI fall into camp #2 where AI is automating a large part of what they considered their art while enabling people in group #1 to iterate on their product faster.

Personally, I fall into the first camp.

No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good your code is.

The general public does not care about anything other than the capabilities and limitations of your product. Sure, if you vibe code a massive bug into your product then that'll manifest as an outcome that impacts the user negatively.

With that said, I do have respect for people in the latter camp. But they're generally best fit for projects where that level of craftsmanship is actually useful (think: mission critical software, libraries us other devs depend on, etc).

I just feel like it's hard to talk about this stuff if we're not clear on which types of projects we're talking about.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#32

Post by simianwords »

dcchambers wrote: post #30
simianwords wrote: post #29

People are not emotionally ready to accept that certain layers of abstraction don’t need as much care and effort if they can be automated. We are at the point where a single class can be dirty but the API of the classes should be clean. There’s no point reviewing the internals of a class anymore. I’m more or less sure that they would work as intended. Next step is that of a micro service itself. The api of that micro…

Does performance not matter? What if your AI uses an O(n) algorithm in a function when an O(log n) implementation exists? The output would still be "correct"

In most cases no. Bottleneck is usual IO.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#33

Post by quentindanjou »

pklausler wrote: post #28
StevenWaterman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safety factors exist because without them, bridges fall down

The free market ensures that bridges stay up, because the bridge-makers don't want to get sued by people who have died in bridge collapses.

This only works when the barrier of entry to sue is low enough to be done and when the law is applied impartially without corruption with sanctions meaningful enough , potentially company-ending, to discourage them.

At the moment you remove one of these factors, free market becomes dangerous for the people living in it.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#34

Post by muskstinks »

... for now.

And just to be clear: AI continues to progress. There are already rumors about the next Anthropic model coming out and we are now in the phase of the biggest centralized reinforcement loop ever existed: everyone using ai for writing and giving it feedback.

We are, thanks to LLMs, able now to codify humans and while its not clear how fast this is, i do not believe anymore that my skills are unique.

A small hobby application costed me 11 dollars on the weekend and took me 3h to 'build' while i would have probably needed 2-3 days for it.

And we are still limited by resources and normal human progress. Like claude team is still exerpimental. Things like gastown or orchestrator architecture/structure is not that estabslihed and consumed quite a lot of tokens.

We have not even had time yet to build optimzed models. Claude code still understand A LOT of languages (human languages and programming languages)

Do not think anyone really cares about code quality. I do but i'm a software engineere. Everyone around me doesn't. Business doesn't. Even fellow co-workers don't or don't understand good code.

Even stupid things like the GTA 5 Online (or was it RDR2?) startup code wasn't found for ages (there was some algo complexity in loading some config file which took ages until someone non rockstar found it and rockstar fixed it).

We also have plenty of code were it doesn't matter as long as it works. Offline apps, scripts, research scripts etc.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#35

Post by Animats »

Meanwhile, the complexity of the average piece of software is drastically increasing. ... The stats suggest that devs are shipping more code with coding agents. The consequences may already be visible: analysis of vendor status pages [3] shows outages have steadily increased since 2022, suggesting software is becoming more brittle.

We've already seen a large-scale AWS outage because of this. It could get much worse. In a few years, we could have major infrastructure outages that the AI can't fix, and no human left understands the code.

AI coders, as currently implemented, don't have a design-level representation of what they're doing other than the prompt history and the code itself. That inherently leads to complexity growth. This isn't fundamental to AI. It's just a property of the way AI-driven coding is done now.

Is anybody working on useful design representations as intermediate forms used in AI-driven coding projects?

"The mending apparatus is itself in need of mending" - "The Machine Stops", by E.M. Forster, 1909.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#36

Post by bombela »

GarnetFloride wrote: post #19
siriusastrebe wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would happen if we made bridges to last as long as possible, to withstand natural disasters and require minimal maintenance? What if we built things that are meant to last? Would the world be better for it?

Look up Roman concrete. There are 2000 year old bridges and aqueducts still in use. We only recently figured out how to reproduce Roman concrete. We’d have more but a lot were blown up during WWII.

There is nothing special about roman concrete compared to moderns concrete. Modern concrete is much better

The difference is that they didn't have rebar. And so they built gravity stable structures. Heavy and costly as fuck.

A modern steel and concrete structure is much lighter and much cheaper to produce.

It does mean a nodern structure doesn't last as long but also the roman stuff we see is what survived the test of time, not what crumbled.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#37

Post by pixl97 »

siriusastrebe wrote: post #21
DeathArrow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if instead of one bridge we build three, so more people can cross the river?

And if your one bridge survived as long as, or longer than three bridges?

Then you still have traffic issues and no one is happy.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#38

Post by pagecalm »

Agreed on the economics side. Clean code saves you time and money whether a human or AI wrote it. That part doesn't change.

But I don't think the models are going to get there on their own. AI will generate a working mess all day long if you let it. The pressure to write good code has to come from the developer actually reviewing what comes out and pushing back. The incentive is there but it only matters if someone acts on it.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#39

Post by pixl97 »

siriusastrebe wrote: post #22
fiedzia wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if we built things that are meant to last? Would the world be better for it? You'd have a better bridge, at the expense of other things, like hospitals or roads. If people choose good-enough bridges, that shows there is something else they value more.

Once the good-enough bridge deteriorates and we have to spend more money maintaining or replacing it Don't we end up just spending the same? Just now we're left with a crappy bridge.

Depends how much the infrastructure and needs around it changes.
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