Slop is not necessarily the future

I think some people are misunderstanding your point.

Yes, some people left to their own devices would take twice as long to ship a product half as buggy only to find out the team that shipped early has taken a massive lead on distribution and now half the product needs to be reworked to catch up.

And some people left to their own devices will also ship a buggy mess way too early to a massive number of people and end up with zero traction or validation out of it, because the bugs weren't letting users properly experience the core experience.

So we've established no one is entirely right, no one is entirely wrong, it's ying/yang and really both sides should ideally exist in each developer in a dynamic balance that changes based on the situation.

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But there's also a 3rd camp that's the intersection of these: You want to make products that are so good or so advanced *, that embracing the craft aspect of coding is inherent to actually achieving the goal.

That's a frontend where the actual product is well outside typical CRUD app forms + dashboard and you start getting into advanced WebGL work, or complex non-standard UI state that most LLMs start to choke on.

Or needing to do things quicker than the "default" (not even naive) approach allows for UX reasons. I ran into this using Needleman-Wunsch to identify UI elements on return visits to a site without an LLM request adding latency: to me that's the "crafty" part of engineering serving an actual user need. It's a completely different experience getting near instant feedback vs the default today of making another LLM request.

And it's this 3rd camp's feedback on LLM development that people in the 1st camp wrongly dismiss as being part the 2nd craft-maxxed group. For some usecases, slop is actually terminal.

Intentionally contrived example, but if you're building a Linear competitor and you vibecode a CRDT setup that works well enough, but has some core decisions that mean it'll never be fast enough to feel instant and frontend tricks are hiding that, but now users are moving faster than the data and creating conflicts with their own actions and...

You backed yourself into a wall that you don't discover until it's too late. It's only hypervigilance and strong taste/opinion at every layer of building that kind of product that works.

LLMs struggle with that kind of work right now and what's worrying is, the biggest flaw (a low floor in terms of output quality) doesn't seem to be improving. Opus 4.6 will still try to dynamically import random statements mid function. GPT 5.3 tried to satisfy a typechecker by writing a BFS across an untyped object instead of just updating the type definitions.

RL seems to be driving the floor lower actually as the failure modes become more and more unpredictable compared to even GPT 3.5 which would not even be "creative enough" to do some of these things. It feels like we need a bigger breakthrough than we've seen in the last 1-2 years to actually get to the point where it can do that "Type 3" work.

* good/advanced to enable product-led growth, not good/advanced for the sake of it

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That example doesn't work well. All regulations come at the cost of freedom, and every freedom comes at the cost of regulations. While it isn't a strict binary (either 100% freedom or 100% regulation), enacting regulations do interfere with freedom. So this isn't just framing, it demonstrates a relationship between the two concepts, which may become relevant down in the discussion, if it already hasn't.

> People who care about code quality are not artists who want to paint on the company's dime. They are people who care about shipping a product deeply enough to make sure that doing so is a pleasant experience both for themselves and their colleagues, and also have the maturity to do a little bit more thinking today, so that next week they can make better decisions without thinking, so that they don't get called at 4 AM the night after launch for some emergency debugging of an issue that that really should have been impossible if it was properly designed.

Speak for yourself. This is exactly the GPs point. Some people care more about the craft of code than the output. I personally find writing good code to be what motivates me. Obviously its a spectrum; shipping is good too. But it's not why I get up in the morning.

> The program wants to depend on some invariant, say that a particular list is always sorted, and the code maintains it by always inserting elements in the right place in the list.

Invariants must be documented as part of defining the data or program module, and ideally they should be restated at any place they're being relied upon. If you fail to do so, that's a major failure of modularity and it's completely foreseeable that you'll have trouble evolving that code.