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Stop Slopware

stopslopware.net

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Re: Stop Slopware

#101

Post by danielbln »

Larrikin wrote: post #10

Why would any actual software engineer be against slopware? When it inevitably all comes crashing down because there was no actual software architecture or understanding of the code, someone will have to come in to make the actual product. Hopefully by then we will have realistic expectations for the LLM, have skilled up, and we as a community treat them as just another feature in the IDE.

This just reads as copium to me. "Those hacks vomiting out slop.. pah, when they call me, the artisan, in to clean up their mess in a way God intended, then they'll see!"

More realistic: AI assisted tooling will continue to improve as it has, the average code quality will rise as conventions and workflows improve and those who wait to be called in to clean up slop or whatever will wait forever, pushed by the wayside by those who can deliver great quality with the help of these new tools.

Re: Stop Slopware

#102

Post by estimator7292 »

wibbily wrote: post #55

It bothers me that so many programmers I know, here and in real life, seem to never actually have cared about the craft of software development? Just about solving problems. I like problem solving too. But I also like theory and craft, and in my naïveté I assumed most of us were like me. LLMs divorced craft-programming from tool-programming and now it seems like there were never any craft-programmers at all. It feels…

The craft is alive and well in embedded spaces.

When I was growing up as a programmer I observed JavaScript and swore I would never, ever touch webdev. As I got older that list kept growing to include mobile, then Apple, then desktop in general.

I like my little world of C where everything must be crafted with care or it just plain doesn't work.

And it's not that there isn't any embedded slopware, but the constraints are so much tighter that you can't really get away with the same level of bad code on 1KB ram and 4KB flash that you can on a 32 core desktop CPU with practically infinite resources.

Re: Stop Slopware

#103

Post by viraptor »

wibbily wrote: post #55

It bothers me that so many programmers I know, here and in real life, seem to never actually have cared about the craft of software development? Just about solving problems. I like problem solving too. But I also like theory and craft, and in my naïveté I assumed most of us were like me. LLMs divorced craft-programming from tool-programming and now it seems like there were never any craft-programmers at all. It feels…

It's a false dichotomy. You can do both, depending on the project. Or even different areas in the same software. There are many things that just need writing and there's really no fancy craft in transcribing that new business rule, regardless how much you care - the difference is just who pushes the buttons for the same result.

This reminds me of the Google/Oracle Java case where one of the example "copied code" fragments was some trivial code with null guards. Anyone could write this and end up with the same code. Human/LLM/whatever doesn't matter. That fragment just needed to exist.

Re: Stop Slopware

#104

Post by cesarb »

danielbln wrote: post #101
Larrikin wrote: post #10

Why would any actual software engineer be against slopware? When it inevitably all comes crashing down because there was no actual software architecture or understanding of the code, someone will have to come in to make the actual product. Hopefully by then we will have realistic expectations for the LLM, have skilled up, and we as a community treat them as just another feature in the IDE.

This just reads as copium to me. "Those hacks vomiting out slop.. pah, when they call me, the artisan, in to clean up their mess in a way God intended, then they'll see!" More realistic: AI assisted tooling will continue to improve as it has, the average code quality will rise as conventions and workflows improve and those who wait to be called in to clean up slop or whatever will wait forever, pushed by the wayside…

> will wait forever, pushed by the wayside by those who can deliver great quality with the help of these new tools.

That sounded a lot like the "have fun staying poor" argument from the peak cryptocurrency days.

Re: Stop Slopware

#105

Post by pegasus »

wibbily wrote: post #100
xeromal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point lol. I think most devs, especially ones that call it a "craft, take themselves too seriously. We're glorified construction workers that get paid a lot

> We're glorified construction workers that get paid a lot That attitude is my point. I'm a developer by trade; I have a different set of feelings and concerns about "the industry" and how new tooling will affect it. (I even use it sometimes at work.) But I'm also a computer scientist and I thought more of you all were too. To beat my original analogy to death: I thought this was a painting forum, but it's more of a…

The brush-strokes are part of the painting (they give texture and structure for example), so a painter would care about them, if he'd care for the end product. But a painter who would instead deeply care about details of the brush incidental to the task of creating paintings, by definition got lost in the woods, or at least stopped being a painter for those moments. It makes sense to care for example about the feel and balance of a brush, because that has a direct impact on the artwork, but say, collecting embellished brushes would be him wearing not a painter's hat (beret?) but a collector's.

My point is that the end-product matters most, and getting wrapped in any other part of the process for its own sake is a failing, or at best a distraction - in both cases.

Re: Stop Slopware

#106

Post by i_love_retros »

I'm not sure if I am just losing my mind at this point, but all this slop everywhere is starting to be funny.

I honest to god am in teams chats at work with high up the food chain architects and leaders (and plain old devs) and people are pasting chatgpt responses either as evidence backing up their claims of how something should be done, or as an actual response to another person as if they typed it themselves.

I have people sending me documents they "put together" that are clearly chatgpt generated, tables and emojis included.

Is this progress?

Re: Stop Slopware

#107

Post by embedding-shape »

viraptor wrote: post #103
wibbily wrote: post #55

It bothers me that so many programmers I know, here and in real life, seem to never actually have cared about the craft of software development? Just about solving problems. I like problem solving too. But I also like theory and craft, and in my naïveté I assumed most of us were like me. LLMs divorced craft-programming from tool-programming and now it seems like there were never any craft-programmers at all. It feels…

It's a false dichotomy. You can do both, depending on the project. Or even different areas in the same software. There are many things that just need writing and there's really no fancy craft in transcribing that new business rule, regardless how much you care - the difference is just who pushes the buttons for the same result. This reminds me of the Google/Oracle Java case where one of the example "copied code" frag…

Hear hear! I don't play video games for the same reasons, nor listen to music for the same reasons every time, and same with creating software.

Most of the times, I write software not to write software, but to solve a problem somewhere, often times not related to software itself. Other times I feel like the UX of some dev tool is bad, and if I just quickly fix that, I can solve my problem faster, so down the rabbit hole we go, which is a different type of experience.

Other times I'm focused on figuring out an elegant design/architecture for something that isn't problem solving, but more "neat piece of software", either a library or some other type that needs some sort of interface, be it library API or actual UI. Then I'll go into "craftmanship" mode and then most of the work actually happens away from the computer, mostly with pen and paper or whiteboards.

I still think the latter is needed for improving the former, and high-quality and easy to maintain code is more important than ever, and if you only do the former, you'll get stuck at a ceiling while only doing the latter, you'll also get stuck if there isn't an actual need (at some level, "fun" can be a need) for it.

Re: Stop Slopware

#108

Post by viraptor »

avian wrote: post #92
pegasus wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you happen to meet the unendingly patient and helpful cook who is willing to explain the recipe in any depth one desires.

You mean the cook who will in the same unendingly patient and helpful manner sometimes confidently suggest putting glue into your dishes and serving your guests rocks for lunch?

There's a difference between recent frontier coding LLMs and Google doing quick-and-cheap RAG on web results. It's good to understand it before posting cheap shots like this.

Re: Stop Slopware

#109

Post by xeromal »

wibbily wrote: post #100
xeromal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point lol. I think most devs, especially ones that call it a "craft, take themselves too seriously. We're glorified construction workers that get paid a lot

> We're glorified construction workers that get paid a lot That attitude is my point. I'm a developer by trade; I have a different set of feelings and concerns about "the industry" and how new tooling will affect it. (I even use it sometimes at work.) But I'm also a computer scientist and I thought more of you all were too. To beat my original analogy to death: I thought this was a painting forum, but it's more of a…

Yeah, I went to school for computer science but I am in no way a scientist. I'm not doing research and I'm not innovating anything that I already hasn't been built. I'm just building it for who needs it.

The space for innovation in computer science is pretty limited when it comes to constructs like how we build something considering how fully featured libraries and such are. Literally everything I've built in my career has been built better by someone else. If I am a scientist, it's the person in the lab making 10,000 flu shots a day.

I'll just say that my career in the industry as a programmer has made me very good at working on my car and I think they're more intertwined and connected then anything theoretical

Re: Stop Slopware

#110

Post by zahlman »

happytoexplain wrote: post #64
mpalmer wrote: post #29

You can't be serious. > When you publish something under the banner of open–source, you implicitly enter a stewardship role. You’re not just shipping files, you’re making a contribution to a shared commons. That carries certain responsibilities: clarity about purpose, honesty about limitations, and a basic alignment with the community’s collaborative ethos. (from the second link) You're not just writing angry screeds…

I can't tell what you're referring to. The quote reads well.

It invokes a couple of classic "LLM writing red flag" tropes. But they're ones that are reasonably appropriate in context.

I have caught myself on occasion rewriting to avoid looking too much like an LLM. But I've also introduced em-dashes to my writing — here's a gratuitous example just for fun — simply because the LLM slop writing discourse prompted me to research the X11 input system.

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