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Slop is not necessarily the future

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Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#131

Post by fooker »

nocman wrote: post #84
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. absolutely false. > The general public does not care about anything other than the capabilities and limitations of your product. also false. People may not know that the reason they like your product is because the code is so good, but everyone likes software that is mostly free from bugs, performs extremely well, helps them do their work qu…

> The longer your product exists the more important the quality of the code will be

From working on many many old and important code bases, the code quality is absolutely trash.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#132

Post by antdke »

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…

Yup - In the end, it’s still just a tool that adheres to the steering (or lack thereof) of the user.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#133

Post by coffeefirst »

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…

This is absolutely false. The purpose of craft is a make a good product.

I don’t care what kind of steel you used to design my car, but I care a great deal that it was designed well, is safe, and doesn’t break down all the time.

Craft isn’t a fussy thing.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#134

Post by latexr »

nocman wrote: post #84
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. absolutely false. > The general public does not care about anything other than the capabilities and limitations of your product. also false. People may not know that the reason they like your product is because the code is so good, but everyone likes software that is mostly free from bugs, performs extremely well, helps them do their work qu…

> You don't have to pick on camp over the other. In my opinion, if you want to make a good product for a user, you should also treat the code you produce for them as your craft. There is no substitute for high quality work.

Exactly, thank you for putting it like that.

So far it’s been my observation that it’s only the people who think like the OP who put the situation in the terms they did. It’s a false dichotomy which has become a talking point. By framing it as “there are two camps, it’s just different, none of them is better”, it lends legitimacy to their position.

For an exaggerated, non-comparable example meant only to illustrate the power of such framing devices, one could say: “there are people who think guns should be regulated, and there are people who like freedom”. It puts the matter into an either/or situation. It’s a strategy to frame the conversation on one’s terms.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#135

Post by yobbo »

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.

I routinely close tabs when I sense that low-quality code is wasting time and resources, including e-commerce sites. Amazon randomly cancelled my account so I will never shop from them. I try to only buy computers and electronics with confirmed good drivers. Etc.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#136

Post by somewhereoutth »

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…

3. You use the act of writing code to think about a given problem, and by so doing not only produce a better code, but also gain a deeper understanding of the problem itself - in combination a better product all around.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#137

Post by Ancalagon »

Maybe the models get better on the code side but I thought slop referred to any AI generated text or imagery? It’s hard to see how most of the internet’s written words won’t be slop, especially when there’s no binding compiler contract like in code.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#138

Post by jmyeet »

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…

I'm going to re-characterize your categorization:

1. The people who don't understand (nor care) about the risks and complexity of what they're delivering; and

2. The people that do.

Widespread AI usage is going to be a security nightmare of prompt injection and leaking credentials and PII.

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

This just isn't true. There's a whole process in purchasing software, buying a company or signing a large contract called "due diligence". Due diligence means to varying degree checking how secure the product is, the company's processes, any security risks, responsiveness to bugfixes, CVEs and so on.

AI is going to absolutely fail any kind of due diligence.

There's a little thing called the halting problem, which in this context basically means there's no way to guarantee that the AI will be restricted from doing anything you don't want it to do. An amusing example was an Air Canada chatbot that hallucinated a refund policy that a court said it had to honor [1].

How confident are we going to be that AIs won't leak customer information, steal money from customers and so on? I'm not confident at all.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#139

Post by ares623 »

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.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#140

Post by Ekaros »

nocman wrote: post #84
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. absolutely false. > The general public does not care about anything other than the capabilities and limitations of your product. also false. People may not know that the reason they like your product is because the code is so good, but everyone likes software that is mostly free from bugs, performs extremely well, helps them do their work qu…

Demos might ne nice an flashy. But eventually you actually have to have generally working product. Too many issues with too many annoyances and eventually users of even enterprise software will be heard. Especially so if there is some actual loss of money or data that is not corrected very fast.

In the end software is means to the end. And if you do not get to end because software is crap it will be replaced, hopefully by someone else.

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