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Slop is not necessarily the future

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Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#461

Post by theshrike79 »

yakattak wrote: post #75
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. If you have buggy software, people don’t use it if there are alternatives. They don’t care about the code but hard to maintain, buggy code will eventually translate to users trying other products.

Good code can also be buggy, bad code can be buggy.

The thing here was that if you have two boxes that take the same input and produce the same output at the same speed, do you care what the insides look like?

What if one is delivered in 4 days and the other in 30 days and costs more? Which one will you pick?

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#462

Post by jaredcwhite »

Good code will win? What kind of delusion is that? The web has been overrun by low effort React & Tailwind monstrosities, and agenetic services have only accelerated that trend. I don't have any confidence that market forces will somehow corral development into a place where "good code" wins.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#463

Post by TheCoelacanth »

nostrademons wrote: post #236
coldtea wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. And in almost all of those cases, they'd be wrong.

I think I calculated the half-life of my code written at my first stint of Google (15 years ago) as 1 year. Within 1 year, half of the code I'd written was deprecated, deleted, or replaced, and it continued to decay exponentially like that throughout my 6-year tenure there. Interestingly, I still have some code in the codebase, which I guess makes sense because I submitted about 680K LOC (note: not all hand-authored,…

Good code is easy to replace and bad code is hard to replace, so bad code is disproportionately long-lived.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#464

Post by mbesto »

theshrike79 wrote: post #452
mbesto wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> obviously created by people the care deeply about the quality of the product they produce This obviously doesn't represent all of the billions of dollars spent on software like Salesforce, SAP, Realpage, Booking.com, etc. etc. (all notoriously buggy, slow, and complex software). You can't tell me with a straight face that all of the thousands of developers who develop these products/services care deeply about the q…

> You're right because there really isn't a consistent definition of what "high quality" software work looks like. And if you can deterministically define "high quality software" with linters, analysers etc - then an AI Agent can also create high quality software within those limits.

ding. ding.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#465

Post by bayindirh »

theshrike79 wrote: post #457
bayindirh wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good your code is. As stated by others, this is very false. Most if not all software I use is selected by its disk/memory footprint and performance. Having a small disk/memory footprint and having good performance at the same time is a good indicator of a good code quality. Moreover, after using computers for more than three decades, you get a feeling about th…

I've built dozens of services and applications for companies. ZERO times has anyone even mentioned disk/memory footprint. Performance maaybe, but no hard limits were defined in any contracts. And even those were "these things have to be processed within 24 hours because the law says so", not microsecond precision. Even Obsidian is 440MB. It's a markdown editor with a built-in javascript scripting system. There's no r…

> Zero people have checked the directory size and went "nah, too big, won't use it".

Nope, at least one. I refused to install software just because it's too big. I resisted using Obsidian exactly of these reasons until I failed to find a credible alternative.

Well, there's ZimWiki, but it wasn't working on macOS well enough to use that daily.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#466

Post by pixl97 »

wreath wrote: post #161
stephc_int13 wrote: post #145

The economic angle is not as clear cut as the authors seem to think. There is an abundance of mediocre and even awful code in products that are not failing because of it. The worst thing about poorly designed software architecture is that it tends to freeze and accumulate more and more technical debt. This is not always a competitive issue, and with enough money you can maintain pretty much any codebases.

Even with enough money, you may not be able to attract/keep talented engineers who are willing to put up with such a work environment (the codebase itself, and probably the culture that led to its state) and who want to ship well built/designed software but are slowed down by the mess.

This completely depends on the current economy.

When you work with F500s you end up seeing code and culture that is absolute balls and that I would never work directly for all the time. And yet roles are always filled. And when the economy gets bad, they have decent engineers.

I call it the fast food quality theory of economics. When the economy is good, low pay jobs tend to have low quality employees and it shows in their products. When the economy gets bad higher quality employees end up downgrading because of layoffs and the quality of these low tier jobs improves.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#467

Post by asutekku »

bayindirh wrote: post #403
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. As stated by others, this is very false. Most if not all software I use is selected by its disk/memory footprint and performance. Having a small disk/memory footprint and having good performance at the same time is a good indicator of a good code quality. Moreover, after using computers for more than three decades, you get a feeling about th…

> Most if not all software I use is selected by its disk/memory footprint and performance.

If that would be true, electron apps would not exists and everything would be a native software. But alas, most modern products, even before vibe-coding are horrible performance-wise.

Of course it depends on the context, but consumer facing products have been awful in terms of performance for a while now.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#468

Post by xigoi »

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 are assuming that people only write software to sell it to someone. Most software I write is either for myself or for an academic project, and in both cases, code sualita definitely matters.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#469

Post by pixl97 »

HeytalePazguato wrote: post #350

The camps framing misses something. After 15 years writing code I've found the people who ship the best products understand both sides. You need to care about craft enough to know when AI output is garbage, and you need to care about shipping enough to not gold-plate things that don't matter. The slop problem isn't AI, it's people who can't tell the difference between good and bad output because they never developed…

>, it's people who can't tell the difference between good and bad output

So probably the vast majority of people that program....

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#470

Post by pixl97 »

POBIX wrote: post #357
fnoef wrote: post #107

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…

Handcrafted furniture costs a lot more money than mass produced furniture. Software, on the other hand, can be free . Even before LLMs I would argue the best code was found in FOSS projects. Nobody is going to use sloppy buggy software if a handcrafted well engineered alternative exists, and is free. In the case of software, the group of people who have principles might be the ones funding FOSS projects, and the soft…

>Nobody is going to use sloppy buggy software if a handcrafted well engineered alternative exists, and is free.

Dear sir, I think you may have already got the entire software market incorrect as it already stands.

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