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Slop is not necessarily the future

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Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#391

Post by danielbln »

ares623 wrote: post #139
vb-8448 wrote: post #3

Good code wasn't winning even before the ai slop era! The pattern was always: ship fast, fix/document later, but when "later" comes "don't touch what is working". To date nothing changed yet, I bet it won't change even in the future.

The irony is that "good" code and good documentation have top priority now in most orgs. For decades the best developers have been screaming about good code and documentation but leadership couldn't give a fuck. But now that their favorite nepobaby is here, now it's the most important thing all of a sudden.

What nepobaby are you talking about?

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#392

Post by _the_inflator »

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…

The dude is right and I strongly side with him however, what is missing is that I oscillate like the TV megahertz that powered the first commercial Pang games between states and this open the space for more grey in between altered states like “Ok, will fix later. Let’s put a #TODO and ship it.”

So instead of criticizing the gentleman for its dichotomy I feel like adding more states to it to complete the picture. And I mean it, this is not making fun of someone it means I tamed myself in stopping to do premature optimization knowing Gigahertz won’t care about me saving a cycle and might even hinder the masterfully crafted compilers from optimizing even more.

3. Partly awesome, partly not so much but don’t need to be awesome.

4. Myself has to understand this masterpiece of human thinking in six months and more from here and after a 20 hour stint I myself marvel at the result so better comment before committing the code into oblivion.

5. Embarrassing, but people are delighted.

6. This made headlines years ago, but some code doesn’t age well.

7. OMG, OOP might looks right, but a new paradigm rushes me into refactoring frenzy and makes the code look better without breaking any features!

8. I used tool to check for bottlenecks and it runs well, but looks crap. So what do I do?

9. Loop unrolling is still a thing or not? Do compilers have headaches just like I do? Do they really care or simply follow orders or adjust to the target platform and settings?

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#393

Post by uduni »

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…

Slop becomes impossible to maintain, and eventually product velocity slows down. Maybe it's ok for an ultra simple todo app, but for most apps code quality absolutely matters... Users expect snappy UX and all the new bells and whistles.

Why did Whatsapp grow so big while thousands of previous chat apps didn't code quality (scalability)

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#394

Post by pxc »

It's striking to me that while the article argues that LLMs and agentic development tools will increasingly trend towards higher and higher quality, but the "pro-AI" comments in this discussion and others tend to announce a "quality doesn't matter" camp.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#395

Post by fatata123 »

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…

[dead]

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#396

Post by rkagerer »

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…

The best of us have a little bit of both 1 and 2.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#397

Post by LoganDark »

tdeck wrote: post #375
brandensilva wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Claude Code used to stream the thinking process in verbose mode. Now that has been replaced with "transcript mode" which doesn't actually give much more information and also doesn't stream anything. They also recently removed (in certain situations) the counter of how many tokens the model's generated in its response in progress, so the only way to tell if it's stuck is to wait 10 minutes and then retry.

Sure, I can read the diffs as they're generated (and I do). But proper transparency goes further than that, and it's being stripped away.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#398

Post by globular-toast »

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…

You are not your job. Take pride in your work. Be kind to others. This is the true path.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#399

Post by qsera »

danielbln wrote: post #388
andersonpico wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes from "llms can do everything as well or better to a human" to "quality doesn't really matter" really fast.

It also went real fast from "GPT hallucinated a library, literally useless" to "this agent has created this entire service up to spec, no notes".

It seems that we are getting bitten by the law that says things that can be measured trumps things that cannot be.

How fast it was to create an initial version of a piece of software can be easily measured.

But how efficient it is, how easy it is to make changes to it, how easy it is to debug it, how easy it is to extend in the direction that the domain requires...all these cannot be easily measured or quantified, but is 10 times more important than that initial creation time....For a software that has to run and maintained for decades delivering value all that time, it does not really matter if the initial version was created in 5 minutes or 1 month, if the 5 minute version does not contribute negatively to all those non-measurable, non-marketable traits of the software.

It is like how camera marketing was mostly around the megapixel value, instead of something vastly more important like low light performance, dynamic range, or fast auto-focus. Because the LCD of the market won't be able to grasp the relevance, and would not act on it. So it was all about megapixel, but at least that does not have a lot of negative consequence unlike the marketing around AI...

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#400

Post by qsera »

andersonpico wrote: post #363
yobbo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The only reason people disagree with me is because they are emotionally deficient."

It goes from "llms can do everything as well or better to a human" to "quality doesn't really matter" really fast.

So may be a charitable interpretation could be that quality does not matter because LLMs can deal with any complexity that comes with the reduction in quality...
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