Slop is not necessarily the future • Hacker News Board

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#171

Post by pm » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

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 is possible to exist in both camps. The quality of the process affects the quality of the product, and the quality of your thought affects the quality of the process. It's a cycle of continual learning, and from that perspective, thought, process and product are indivisible.

Treating code as a means to an end doesn't guarantee success for your product anymore than treating code as a craft.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#172

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:14 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #13

briantakita wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was told by an exec...once a company or technology implements something and gets mindshare, the community (including companies) moves on. Competition is essentially dead for that segment given there is always outward growth. With that being said, AI enables smaller players to implement their visions with enough completeness to be viable. And with a hands off approach to code, the underlying technology mindshare doe…

If that were true first movers would always win. Hotmail came before Gmail. Yahoo came before Google. Myspace came before Facebook. Et cetera. Of course it is best to avoid competition by creating a new (sub)category but category kings can change.

[deleted]

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#173

Post by jillesvangurp » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:15 PM UTC

Getting AI tools to produce better code is not that hard; if you know how to do things right yourself. Basically, all you need to do is ask it to. Ask it to follow SOLID principles. Ask it to stick to guard rails. Ask it to eliminate code duplication, write tests, harden code bases, etc. It will do it. Most people just don't know what to ask for. Or even that they should be asking for it. Or how to ask for it. A lot of people getting messy results need to look in the mirror.

I'm using AI for coding just like everybody else. More or less exclusively since a few months. It's sometimes frustrating to get things done the right way but mostly I get the job done. I've been coding since the nineties. So, I know how to do things right and what doing it wrong looks like. If I catch my AI coding tools doing it wrong, I tell it to fix it and then adjust skills and guard rails to prevent it going off the rails.

AI tools actually seem to self correct when used in a nice code base. If there are tests, they'll just write more tests without needing to be prompted. If there is documentation, that gets updated along with the code. When you start with a vibe coded mess it can escalate quickly unless you make it clean up the mess. Sometimes the tests it adds are a bit meh and you have to tell it off by "add some tests for the non happy path cases, make sure to cover all possible exceptions, etc.". You can actually ask for a critical code review and then tell it "fix all of that". Sometimes it's as simple as that.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#174

Post by sergiotapia » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:16 PM UTC

The slop debt will always come to collect.

A certain big PaaS I won't name here has had lots of clusterfucks in the last 3 months. The CEO is extremely bought into AI and "code not mattering anymore". He's also constantly talking about the meteoric growth because Claude and other AI providers are using railway as default suggestions.

The toll has come to collect and now a lot of real production users are looking at alternatives.

The reality is the market is rewarding slop and "velocity now". There will come a time where it will reward quality again.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#175

Post by solid_fuel » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:17 PM UTC

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 easy to write off critics of this slop development as just "caring about the wrong thing", but that is couched in incorrect assumptions. This is the unfortunately common mistake of confusing taking responsibility with some sort of "caring about the code" in an artistic sense. I can certainly appreciate the artistry of well-written code, but I care about having a solid and maintainable code-base because I am accountable for what the code I write does.

Perhaps this is an antiquated concept which has fallen out of favor in silicon valley, but code doesn't just run in an imaginary world where there are no consequences and everything is fun all the time. You are responsible for the product you sell. If you sell a photo app that has a security bug, you are responsible for your customers nude photos being leaked. If you vibe-code a forum and store passwords in plaintext, you are responsible for the inevitable breech and harm.

The "general public" might not care, but that is only because the market is governed by imperfect information. Ultimately the public are the ones that get hurt by defective products.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#176

Post by skydhash » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:19 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #122

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 generally fall into the first camp, too, but the code that AI produces is problematic because it's code that will stop working in an unrecoverable way after some number of changes. That's what happened in the Anthropic C compiler experiment (they ended up with a codebase that wasn't working and couldn't be fixed), and that's what happens once every 3-5 changes I see Codex making in my own codebase. I think, if I ha…

It can be especially bad if the architecture is layered with each one having its own invariant. Like in a music player, you may have the concept of a queue in the domain layer, but in the UI layer you may have additional constraints that does not relate to that. Then the agent decide to fix a bug in the UI layer because the description is a UI bug, while it’s in fact a queue bug

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#177

Post by peacebeard » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:19 PM UTC

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 this is a false dichotomy. Maybe there is some theoretical developer who cares about their craft only due to platonic idealism, but most developers who care about their craft want their code to be correct, fast, maintainable, usable, etc. in ways that do indeed benefit its users. At worst, misalignment in priorities can come into play, but it's much more subtle than developers either caring or not caring about craft.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#178

Post by squidsoup » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:19 PM UTC

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…

false dichotomy - you need to care about both.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#179

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:20 PM UTC

contextfree wrote: post #154

benoau wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the code will, but by year 5 nobody is left who worked on it from inception, and by year 10 nobody knows anybody who did, and during that time it reaches a stage where nobody will ever feel any sense of ownership or care about the code in its entirety again.

I come into work and work on a 20 year old codebase every day, working on slowly modernizing it while preserving the good parts. In my experience, and I've been experimenting with both a lot, LLM-based tools are far worse at this than they are at starting new greenfield projects.

This conversation shows how diverse the field is!

When it comes to professional development, I've almost never worked on a codebase less than 10 years old, and it was always [either silently or overtly] understood that the software we are writing is a project that's going to effectively live forever. Or at least until the company is no longer recognizable from what it is today. It just seems wild and unbelievable to me, to go to work at a company and know that your code is going to be compiled, sent off to customers, and then nobody is ever going to touch it again. Where the product is so throwaway that you're going to work on it for about a year and then start another greenfield codebase. Yet there are companies that operate that way!

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#180

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 8:22 PM UTC

nocman wrote: post #84

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 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 history of technology is filled with examples where between two competing analogous products, the inferior always wins. It does not matter if it is only slightly inferior or extraordinarily inferior, both win out. It's often difficult to come up with counter-examples. Why is this? Economic pressure. "Inferior" costs less. Sometimes the savings are passed on to the customer... they choose the inferior. Other times the greedy corporate types keep all of it (and win simply because they outmarket the competitor). It does not matter.

If there are people who, on principle, demand the superior product then those people simply aren't numerous enough to matter in the long run. I might be one of those people myself, I think.