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Slop is not necessarily the future

greptile.com

221–230 of 512 posts

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#221
> I want to argue that AI models will write good code because of economic incentives.

The economic incentives on the internet by and large favor the production of slop. A significant proportion of the text-based web was content-farmed even before LLMs - and with the advent of LLMs, you now have slop-results for almost every search query imaginable, including some incredibly niche topics. We've seen the same trend with video: even before gen AI, online video consumption devolved toward carefully-engineered, staged short-form bait (TikTok, YT Shorts, etc). In the same vein, the bulk of the world's email traffic is phishing and spam.

None of this removed the incentive to produce high-quality websites, authentic and in-depth videos, and so on. But in practice, it made such content rare and made it harder for high-quality products to thrive. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that good software will survive in the LLM era. But I'm also absolutely certain that most app stores will be overrun by slop, most games on Steam will be slop, etc.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't a fair reading.

Neither is the original assertion. There are thousands of examples of exceptionally well crafted code bases that are used by many. I would posit the Linux kernel as an example, which is arguably the most used piece of software in the world.

> [...] one beautiful thing than ten useful things

They didn't say beautiful/crafted things were not necessary.

They were critiquing viewpoints that all code needs to be.

Even if we (for humorous purposes) took their 1 in 10 ratio as a deadly serious cap on crafting, 10% of projects being "exceptionally well crafted code" would be a wonderful world. I would take 1% high craft to 99% useful! (Not disjointly of course.)

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#223

“John Ousterhout [..] argues that good code is: - Simple and easy to understand - Easy to modify” In my career at fast-moving startups (scaling seed to series C), I’ve come to the same conclusion: > Simple is robust I’m sure my former teams were sick of me saying it, but I’ve found myself repeating this mantra to the LLMs. Agentic tools will happily build anything you want, the key is knowing what you want!

Yes. Which is why "I generated X lines of code" "I used a billion tokens this month" sound stupid to me. Like I used 100 gallons of petrol this month and 10 kilos of rabbit feed!

People use stupid metrics like those because more useful ones, like "productivity" or "robustness" are pretty much impossible to objectively measure.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#224

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…

It all depends on the tools. AI will surely give a competitive advantage to people working with better languages and tooling, right? Because they can tell the AI to write code and tests in a way that quashes bugs before they can even occur.

And then they can ship those products much faster than before, because human hours aren't being eaten up writing out all of these abstractions and tests.

The better tooling will let the AI iterate faster and catch errors earlier in the loop.

Right?

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#225
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…

Artisanal crafts are alive and well. It turns out that some people actually prefer handmade stuff to the mass-produced kind, and there's plenty enough of them for a viable market, at least for the highest-quality producers. The real losers are those who make stuff of only barely-acceptable quality: they have no edge over what's mass produced, their middling skills lose value and they're forced to exit the sector.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs didn't really know anything about cabinetry, because using plywood / MDF in places where it won't be seen but which would benifit from dimensional stability is absolutely common and there's no reason it shouldn't be.

You might be missing the point of the quote. He's not talking about whether it is commonly done. He's talking about the mentality that justifies sacrificing the aesthetic and artistry, in favor of things like "dimensional stability". He is giving a reason why it shouldn't be done, and people can disagree about whether the reason is a good one.

He's saying that carpenters who make nice things wouldn't use a material like that, but they objectively do and this doesn't sacrifice the aesthetic or artistry.

He specifically calls out the use of the material in a place it wouldn't be seen as something that the carpenter making beautiful cabinets wouldn't do, but that's actually something they absolutely do. He's trying to argue some other point by way of this analogy, but his analogy is wrong because he doesn't know anything about it. It would be like if I was trying to argue my point by way of car analogy but the example I chose was to say that car enthusiasts insist on genuine OEM parts, I'm only exposing myself as somebody who doesn't understand car people.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#227

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…

That’s non sense. Every software people pay or use as their professional tool should be carefully crafted. Would you buy a house/car/anything or value knowing that people who built it don’t care about their craft as long as you got it in your hands and pay for it ? Or maybe you produce something cheap and worthless

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#228
post #181
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 can't tell me with a straight face that all of the thousands of developers who develop these products/services care deeply about the quality of the product.

What about caring and being depressed because quality comes from systems rather than (just) individuals?

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#229

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…

It's the end of era where the plucky code crafter gets to have a seat at the table of production. Those skills are going to become less and less useful going forward. Industry is going to stop hiring those types.

The future of software looks a lot more like factory production lines with a small group of architect-tier engineers working on a design with product management and then feeding it into the factory for prototyping and production.

If you're not an experienced late senior or principal engineer at your career stage by now there is basically no future for you in this industry. Lower end roles will continue to be reduced. People who can build and maintain the factory and understand its outputs are going to be the remaining high-value software talent.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#230
post #84

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…

I treat the code I produce as my craft and I appreciate I can afford it and enjoy the output.

I know engineers who aren't that lucky and struggle in "enterprise" software development, where slop was a feature for decades - people making decisions won't use the software (their low paid employees will) and software monstrosities need a hell a lot of support which sometimes brings more revenue than the original purchase.

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