Live data from Hacker News

Stop Slopware

stopslopware.net

111–120 of 171 posts

Re: Stop Slopware

#111
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did it? Cryptocurrency enabled gambling and illicit purchases, that's it. In all other ways it was/is a solution in need for a problem.

Current gen AI has a ton of issues, but it nevertheless enables vast amounts of use cases today, right now.

And hoping that slop that is created today will provide work for the artisanal craftsman in the future is wishful thinking at best.

Re: Stop Slopware

#112

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 ha…

Do we work at the same company?

Re: Stop Slopware

#113
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…

> Just about solving problems

Or just about making money :(

Re: Stop Slopware

#114

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.

New job title: “vibe coding cleanup specialist”

https://vibebusters.com/

Re: Stop Slopware

#115
post #69

> keep the commons clean [from the second link] A glance at the r/python will show that almost every week there is a new pypi package generated by ai, with dubious utility. I did a quick research using bigquery-public-data.pypi.distribution_metadata and out of 844719 package, 126527 have only 1 release, almost 15%. While is not unfathomable that a chunk of those really only needed one release and/or were manually wri…

Storage is relatively cheap. Packages with only one release and little usage in the wild will be a rounding error in cost. A few years ago, Pypi required an over million dollars equivalent in CDN traffic per month. Storing a million of small dead packages is not worth the concern.

Re: Stop Slopware

#116
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…

Every now and then someone posts the "X programmers (implied good) hate AI, Y programmers (implied bad) hate AI!" and every time people come out of the woodwork to point out that, no, X programmers can also use AI to take out things they can delegate and focus on stuff that's cool. Case in point, Steve Klabnik, a programmer who nobody can say doesn't care about the craft, is working on a new language primarily with A…

It can be, yeah. I use it sometimes to shim libraries or write one-off scripts. But it's made me disgustingly introspective. Why do I do anything? Where do I draw my lines?

An example. I've been writing a Lisp, and I'm using GNU Readline for text input. Later I found out that Readline can't be built for WebAssembly, and I decided to have Claude write a podunk replacement for it. I now have a bit of code in my Git, attached to my name, that I didn't write

What did I lose by doing that? My goal wasn't "to write a Readline", that's why I was using it in the first place. But my goal also wasn't "to have a working Lisp interpreter" or even like "to know how a Lisp interpreter works". It was a desire to Know More. Surely I'd have learned something useful (in some form) by doing all the minutiae myself. Or would I have learned more by doing none of it and printing out the SBCL source to read over coffee?

Sorry, I ended up rambling. I don't have any answers. I think I'm just butthurt by the "X, Y" sort of comments you mentioned and the solution is (as always) to touch grass

Re: Stop Slopware

#117
post #92
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?

That's part of the cook being helpful. It's how they check that you're not asleep at the wheel and your critical thinking is awake and engaged ;)

Re: Stop Slopware

#118
post #6

> if you’re doing this for your own learning: you will learn better without AI . I'm certain that's not true. AI is the single biggest gift we could possible give to people who are learning to program - it's shaved that learning curve down to a point where you don't need to carve out six months of your life just to get to a point where you can build something small and useful that works. AI only hurts learning if you…

Rejecting AI as a learning tool looks to me like a very good policy in an academic setting.

And the completely wrong decision in a hobby setting.

Re: Stop Slopware

#120
If i had to give advice to young programmers, it would be this: be comfortable with set theory and notation. It’s interesting that once you collect use cases, sketch the objects, and express everything in a set-theoretical fashion, the programs almost write themselves. You can even feed this set-theoretic notation directly to an LLM and get code in return. It’s a perfectly honest way to incorporate LLMs into your workflow.
Post reply on HN