these economic incentives for good code would also apply to code before llms no? And we have had plenty of shit code that stayed shit for a long time. I find this idea that economic incentives will necessarily drive the outcomes you desire to be akin to a religious belief for some people.
Slop is not necessarily the future
261–270 of 512 posts
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#262This website and entire startup ecosystem is a low IQ circle jerk that shouldn’t be taken seriously
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#263[flagged]
Apparently there’s no economic pressure toward brevity in LLM generated slop comments either. And no, they’re not flat subscriptions. Use more tokens and your quota is gone faster.
Not true with github copilot. Cost is per prompt no matter how many tokens the prompt uses. Which can vary by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude...
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#264I 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 ple…
Code quality is a side-effect of caring. The most important part of product design is caring at all levels. However it's caring about the external details that is the most important. Coding language is largely a function of the population of good coders in your areas. Code evolvability is almost entirely subjective.
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never considered that the mods of this site are literally discussing with the people heading yc companies how to game their hn-titles for better interaction. How naive I am.
We discuss these things all the time with people who email us whether they head yc companies or not.
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Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#266Earlier 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…
Garbage software that is slow as a dog has been winning. While we’ve been obsessing over our craft and arguing about what makes software beautiful, slow crappy software has taken over the world. Quality of code is just not that important of a concept anymore for the average web developer building some saas tool. React code was always crap anyways. Unless you are building critical systems like software that powers a p…
There's a lot of space between web dev and medical equipment. I've never met a user that loved how often their work was lost or how long it took to implement feature requests amid all the ship-it-quick duct tape.
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#267None of this is true. Pretty much all JavaScript code is slop because the language is god awful. It’s so bad that we spent the last 20 years trying to code around the severe limitations of the language itself. Despite everyone knowing that JS sucks, no one has been able to displace it. Slop wins. Typically because of first mover advantage.
Everyone who sucks at JavaScript says this. Same with CSS lol
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#268I 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.
I got my company to switch from GitHub to GitLab after repeated outages. I've always moved companies to away from using GCP or Azure because of their reliability problems.
This is a really funny comment.
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#269Coming from the same founder who (famously) required 7-day work weeks (no days off ever) lol
Is that still the future or nah?
Re: Slop is not necessarily the future
#270I 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…
Option 1 is a PM.