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Stop Slopware

stopslopware.net

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Re: Stop Slopware

#141

Post by CamperBob2 »

cesarb wrote: post #104
danielbln wrote: post #101

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.

No, not really.

Re: Stop Slopware

#142

Post by erelong »

Sounds like you mostly want:

-to encourage people to develop more basic programming knowledge and skills (with AI or other manual methods) so they don't produce as much "slop"

-to catch "slop" being created and either discourage people from using it, or to get manual or AI review of the code to make it "decent", and volunteers working to clean it up or this could turn in to probably a whole industry (of people with some knowledge of how to create their projects, who want professional input or rewrites of their code)

So it sounds like a lot of "opportunity" to be made use of in some different ways

edit: another alternative might be creating "competing" functioning projects to "slop projects" where applicable (sometimes a good idea might exist, but it could be implemented better or in a complementary way by another project)

Re: Stop Slopware

#143

Post by JackSlateur »

magnitudes wrote: post #30

I find these really are not only condescending but also really miss the mark and ironically come off as really uneducated in my opinion, and that really is the most infuriating type of condescension. What you call slopware today is becoming less and less sloppy every six months as new coding models drop. In 2 years the “unmaintainable mess” is going to be far better and far more maintainable than anything the enginee…

That is your belief, not a fact

It has been years since "new models will perform less sloppy code, in 6 months"

Current code is still dumb as hell. The emoticons is the part that works really well.

Re: Stop Slopware

#144

Post by sorokod »

viraptor wrote: post #126
estimator7292 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> world of C where everything must be crafted with care or it just plain doesn't work. I hope you track the progress so you're not surprised one day. The research side is way past embedded C and VHDL was of interest a year ago https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3670474.3685966 In embedded code, recent LLMs can do just fine with popular architectures. It's down to the spec and test harness whether embedded C works or not.…

The spec and the test harness - that is all in a nutshell.

Re: Stop Slopware

#145

Post by estimator7292 »

viraptor wrote: post #126
estimator7292 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> world of C where everything must be crafted with care or it just plain doesn't work. I hope you track the progress so you're not surprised one day. The research side is way past embedded C and VHDL was of interest a year ago https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3670474.3685966 In embedded code, recent LLMs can do just fine with popular architectures. It's down to the spec and test harness whether embedded C works or not.…

I'm not saying LLMs can't write embedded C.

I'm saying that the resources available are really limiting for careless slop. At least on the 8-bit end of the spectrum.

The point is that the constraints demand some amount of care. LLM's are capable of that if you hold their hand and keep them focused, but you the programmer still need to know what you're doing.

I don't think there's a moat at all. I think the size of the problem space and the resources available make it a challenge to do anything too horrendous and have it still "work".

Re: Stop Slopware

#146

Post by m463 »

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…

Personally I think of custom houses vs tract homes as an analogy.

People won't care that much if their daily life software is developed by artisan developers, offshore coders or ai. They will just need to get things done and won't be able to tell who wrote the code.

That said, I still think there will be a spec, and that spec will mostly be written by humans.

Re: Stop Slopware

#147

Post by OptionOfT »

pbalau wrote: 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…

Same on r/rust. Post after post with a new project that does something groundbreaking.

Until you look at the source code and notice it's all held together by Duct tape.

Re: Stop Slopware

#148

Post by viraptor »

estimator7292 wrote: post #145
viraptor wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> world of C where everything must be crafted with care or it just plain doesn't work. I hope you track the progress so you're not surprised one day. The research side is way past embedded C and VHDL was of interest a year ago https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3670474.3685966 In embedded code, recent LLMs can do just fine with popular architectures. It's down to the spec and test harness whether embedded C works or not.…

I'm not saying LLMs can't write embedded C. I'm saying that the resources available are really limiting for careless slop. At least on the 8-bit end of the spectrum. The point is that the constraints demand some amount of care. LLM's are capable of that if you hold their hand and keep them focused, but you the programmer still need to know what you're doing. I don't think there's a moat at all. I think the size of th…

I was responding a more to the crafted part. I see the craft and care as different things that can be done mostly independently (there will be some overlap). For example writing a full spec and tests that run against an emulator and telling LLM to implement the whole project is full care, minimal (coding) craft.

Re: Stop Slopware

#150

Post by Viliam1234 »

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 customers these days are willing to pay for programs full of bugs that require enormous amounts of resources, so the craft no longer generates profits.
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