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Slop is not necessarily the future

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Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#101

Post by Nevermark »

seamossfet wrote: post #31

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…

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

It mystifies me when people don't intuit this.

For any suitably sized project, there are parts where elegance and friction removal are far more important than others. By an order or two of magnitude.

I have shipped beautifully-honed, highly craft code. Right alongside jank that was debugged in the "Well it seems to work now" and "Don't touch anything behind this in-project PI" category.

There are very good reasons and situations for both approaches, even in one project.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#102

Post by JambalayaJimbo »

seamossfet wrote: post #31

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…

You need both to be a great software engineer. The "means to an end" people will happily slop out PRs and let the "craft" people worry about it.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#103

Post by ttamslam »

steveBK123 wrote: post #98
nocman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good your code is. absolutely false. > The general public does not care about anything other than the capabilities and limitations of your product. also false. People may not know that the reason they like your product is because the code is so good, but everyone likes software that is mostly free from bugs, performs extremely well, helps them do their work qu…

> The longer your product exists the more important the quality of the code will be. This obsession so many have with "get it out the door in 5 seconds" is only going to continue the parade of garbage software that is slow as a dog, and uses gigabytes of memory to perform simple tasks. Exactly. A lot of devs optimizing for whether the feature is going to take a day or an hour, but not contemplating that it's going to…

> but not contemplating that it's going to be out in the wild for 10 years either way

I think there are a lot of developers working in repos where it's almost guaranteed that their code will _not_ still be there in 10 years, or 5 years, or even 1 year.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#104

Post by seamossfet »

almostdeadguy wrote: post #82
seamossfet wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public doesn't care about the code itself, they absolutely care about the quality and experience of using the software. But you can have an extremely well designed product that functions flawlessly from the perspective of the user, but under the hood it's all spaghetti code. My point was that consuming software as a user of the product can be quite different from the experience of writing that software. Facebook…

I have yet to meet anyone whose problem with AI is that the code is not aesthetically pleasing, but that would actually be an indicator to me that people are using these things responsibly. My own two cents: there's an inherent tension with assistants and agents as productivity tools. The more you "let them rip", the higher the potential productivity benefits. And the less you will understand the outputs, or even if…

>But if your workload is not shifting from write-heavy to read-heavy, you inevitably will be responsible for a major outage or quality issue.

I think that's actually a good way to look at it. I use AI to help produce code in my day to day, but I'm still taking quite a while to produce features and a lot of it is because of that. I'm spending most of my time reading code, adjusting specs, and general design work even if I'm not writing code myself.

There's no free lunch here, the workflow is just different.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#105

Post by Darmani »

seamossfet wrote: post #31

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…

No-one comes out of the womb caring about code quality. People learn to care about the craft precisely because internal quality -- cohesion, modularity, robustness -- leads to external quality (correctness, speed, evolvability).

People who care about code quality are not artists who want to paint on the company's dime. They are people who care about shipping a product deeply enough to make sure that doing so is a pleasant experience both for themselves and their colleagues, and also have the maturity to do a little bit more thinking today, so that next week they can make better decisions without thinking, so that they don't get called at 4 AM the night after launch for some emergency debugging of an issue that that really should have been impossible if it was properly designed.

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

Usually they don't get to see the internals of the product, but they can make inferences based on its externals. You've heard plenty of products called a "vibe-coded piece of crap" this year, even if they're not open source.

But also, this is just not true. Code quality is a factor in lots of purchasing decisions.

When buying open source products, having your own team check out the repo is incredibly common. If there are glaring signs in the first 5 minutes that it was hacked together, your chances of getting the sale have gone way down. In the largest deals, inspecting the source code

It was for an investment decision rather than for a purchase, but I've been personally hired to do some "emergency API design" so a company can show that it both has the thing being designed, and that their design is good.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#106

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Benjammer wrote: post #76
iamcalledrob wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sloppy technical design ends up manifesting in bugs, experiential jank, and instability. There are some types of software (e.g. websites especially), where a bit of jank and is generally acceptable. Sessions are relatively short, and your users can reload the webpage if things stop working. The technical rigor of these codebases tends to be poor, but it's generally fine. Then there's software which is very sensitive…

> the quality really does matter. If this level of quality/rigor does matter for something like a game, do you think the market will enforce this? If low rigor leads to a poor product, won't it sell less than a good product in this market? Shouldn't the market just naturally weed out the AI slop over time, assuming it's true that "quality really does matter"? Or were you thinking about "matter" in some other sense th…

Even if you're confident you can stop your own company from shipping terrible products, I worry the trend is broad enough and hard enough to audit that the market will enforce it by pulling back on all purchases of such software. If gamers learn that new multiplayer games are just always laggy these days, or CTOs learn that new databases are always less reliable, it's not so easy to convince them that your product is different than the rest.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#107

Post by fnoef »

I wish it was true, but it sounds like copium. I bet garment makers, or artisan woodworkers said the same when big store cheap retails came. I bet they said "people value quality and etc", but in the end, outside of a group of people who has principles, everyone else floods their home with H&Ms and crap from Temu.

So yeah, good code might win among small group of principled people, but the majority will not care. And more importantly, management won't care. And as long as management don't care, you have two choices: "embrace" slop, or risk staying jobless in a though market.

Edit: Also, good code = expensive code. In an economy where people struggle to afford a living, nobody is going to pay for good code when they can get "good enough" code for 200$ a month with Claude.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#108

Post by meheleventyone »

seamossfet wrote: post #31

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…

You realize you’re essentially building a false dichotomy? I work in video games where code really is a means to an end but still see that authorship is important even if that code is uuuuugly due to it being the expression of the game itself. From that perspective I’m neither worried about craft or product but my ability to express myself though code as the game behaves. Although if you really must have only two categories I’d be in camp one.

As such AI is a net negative as it would be in writing a novel or making any other kind of art.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#109

Post by farmeroy »

seamossfet wrote: post #31

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…

I think developers fall into two camps:

1. you care about shipping working, tested code that solves a specific business/user problem

2. you care about closing tickets that were assigned to you

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#110

Post by steveBK123 »

ttamslam wrote: post #103
steveBK123 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The longer your product exists the more important the quality of the code will be. This obsession so many have with "get it out the door in 5 seconds" is only going to continue the parade of garbage software that is slow as a dog, and uses gigabytes of memory to perform simple tasks. Exactly. A lot of devs optimizing for whether the feature is going to take a day or an hour, but not contemplating that it's going to…

> but not contemplating that it's going to be out in the wild for 10 years either way I think there are a lot of developers working in repos where it's almost guaranteed that their code will _not_ still be there in 10 years, or 5 years, or even 1 year.

It's important to know which type of repo/project you are in and hire/code accordingly.

I've seen mismatch in each direction..

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