Slop is not necessarily the future • Hacker News Board

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#371

Post by arnitdo » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:15 AM UTC

pagecalm wrote: post #38

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 a…

> 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

You are reinventing the wheel again with yet another form of reinforcement learning. I don't use any form of LLM assistance for coding, but if I have to continually tell it what to do, how to do it, what not to do, what assumptions to make - I would rather stimulate my neurons more by doing that damn thing itself.

The narrative of "Yeah it will do everything, provided you tell it how to do everything!" seems baseless, personally. Even if you emulate the smartest human possible, can you emulate an idiot?

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#372

Post by d0mine » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:30 AM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #56

clan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect your opinion and especially your honesty. And at the same time I hope that you will some day be forced to maintain a project written by someone else with that mindset. Cruel, yes. But unfortunately schadenfreude is a real thing - I must be honest too. I have gotten to old for ship now, ask questions later projects.

I'm in camp 1 too. I've maintained projects developed with that mindset. It's fine! Your job is to make the thing work, not take on its quality as part of your personal identity. If it's harder to work with, it's harder to work with, it's not the end of the world. At least it exists, which it probably wouldn't have if developed with "camp 2" tendencies. I think camp 2 would rather see one beautiful thing than ten use…

I don't get how camp 1 can ship more than one version (do they jump teams/companies each time?). If your code is immovable mess then how do you add features/fix bugs in time?

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#373

Post by cortesoft » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:33 AM 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 funny because I feel like I am both. Sometimes I am in it for the code itself, and the process of writing it. I see how the code will perfectly fit what I want to do, and I am so excited to make that happen. I want to make that thing.

Other times, I have something specific I want to accomplish, but I dread the amount of time it will take to make it happen.

Now, it is never that I don't know HOW to make it happen, it is that I know how, and I know how many steps it is and how many components there are to build to even get the simplest version running and I just dread it. I want the thing, but I don't want to spend the time to make the thing.

I have had so much fun recently making so many things that I have never gotten around to over the years, because I just couldn't justify the time.

I also have the time to tell the AI to add all the nice to haves, and handle all the edge cases that weren't worth the time before, etc.

I am having a blast. I still stop to write the fun bits when I want to, though. It is great because I only have to code the bits I want, that are fun.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#374

Post by yurimo » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 4:58 AM 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…

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

When I make a purchasing decision I expect the payment to go trough quickly and correctly and for whatever I purchase to arrive to me in reasonable time. All of this rests on the reputation of software being solid. If a user hears a whiff of purchase not being executed correctly, money or goods going somewhere else, this is the death sentence for your company.

Industry is now pushing for agentic web where agents can do this on your behalf. But if we have slop foundations and then add unstable models that can hallucinate and make mistakes on top of it, then it's just a recipe for catastrophe. I think relegating 2) into category of only mission critical software escapes the reality of how much reliability goes into everyday services people use.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#375

Post by tdeck » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:17 AM UTC

brandensilva wrote: post #346

Animats wrote: post #35

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.…

Even the prompt history is notoriously weak given how little Claude Code and some of the others display to give developers confidence in the process. There needs to me more design rep indeed.

Claude Code displays plenty in my opinion, if you make it ask you for approval before each code change. You can read the code as it's being built up and understand if it's going in a bad direction before it does that and then piles on more and more slop.

The trouble is people don't want to bother reviewing the changes.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#376

Post by snthpy » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:20 AM 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…

Well put. I agree.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#377

Post by tdeck » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:21 AM UTC

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.

I'm going to assume this is Poe's Law at work?

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#378

Post by bit-anarchist » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:24 AM UTC

qotgalaxy wrote: post #365

bit-anarchist wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The increase of freedom of the users is an indirect side effect, intentional or not, which, as you put it, can happen, or not. But a direct effect, which is guaranteed to happen, is the loss of freedom of the manufacturer. Whether that's a good thing, that's another topic.

The increase of freedom of the slaves is an indirect side effect. But a direct effect, which is guaranteed to happen is the loss of freedom of the slaveholder.

That's certainly a perspective, specially given how slavery is often regulated into law.

But I digress, there's a plentiful discussion to be had about the ethics and morality of freedom/regulations, but my point is how there is, in fact, a dichotomy between both and it isn't just framing. Which, in a sense, you just corroborated.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#379

Post by advael » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:24 AM UTC

At this point I can't help but conclude that to a certain class of writers, "economic incentives" are a form of benevolent god who will surely, inevitably make things better in directions they care about, and those who believe this also believe the overwhelming and constant evidence to the contrary of their position is just a temporary anomaly

Whatever the hell economics was supposed to do, right now it seems to be causing every industry to produce worse products, lay off more people, and concentrate wealth in an aristocratic subset of the population, and this has been going on for the better part of my entire lifetime. If we're to reverse this trend, we need to stop pretending that economics is a natural force and remember that it is a complex system made of policy decisions that can in fact be the wrong ones

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#380

Post by rzmmm » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:38 AM UTC

advael wrote: post #379

At this point I can't help but conclude that to a certain class of writers, "economic incentives" are a form of benevolent god who will surely, inevitably make things better in directions they care about, and those who believe this also believe the overwhelming and constant evidence to the contrary of their position is just a temporary anomaly Whatever the hell economics was supposed to do, right now it seems to be c…

And who knows what the economic incentives are in couple years. Maybe the focus shifts towards one-shotting complex million SLOC codebases which are order of magnitude more sloppy than the current outputs.