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Slop is not necessarily the future

greptile.com

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Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#241

Post by Darmani »

mkehrt wrote: post #237
Darmani wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No-one comes out of the womb caring about code quality. People learn to care about the craft precisely because internal quality -- cohesion, modularity, robustness -- leads to external quality (correctness, speed, evolvability). 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 ple…

> 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…

Okay, I admit I went too hard on that one to fight against the OP. I too get extreme pleasure from condensing a 300-line function into 30 lines of simplicity, even when practical considerations (it has a clean interface and no-one's even needed to open this file in 2 years) would dictate elegance there is not helpful.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#242

Post by emp17344 »

quantummagic wrote: post #146
bakugo wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I have an opinion and everyone on the planet agrees with me, if you disagree, you don't matter" is not a useful insight, and is, in fact, far more emotional and dismissive than any of the replies to it.

That's a horribly broken misrepresentation of what was said in the original post. If that's what you took away from it, you're not reading carefully or critically.

That is, in fact, how it comes across. You’re labeling perceived opponents as “emotional” and “dismissive”.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#243

Post by alt187 »

yobbo wrote: post #162
simianwords wrote: post #29

People are not emotionally ready to accept that certain layers of abstraction don’t need as much care and effort if they can be automated. We are at the point where a single class can be dirty but the API of the classes should be clean. There’s no point reviewing the internals of a class anymore. I’m more or less sure that they would work as intended. Next step is that of a micro service itself. The api of that micro…

"The only reason people disagree with me is because they are emotionally deficient."

As opposed to me, who is perfectly rational.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#245

Post by solid_fuel »

Gigachad wrote: post #194
solid_fuel wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find most home inspectors fall into one of two camps: 1. You treat the house as a means to an end to make a living space for a person. 2. You treat the building construction itself as your craft, with the house being a vector for your craft. The people who typically have the most negative things to say about buildings fall into camp #2 where cheap unskilled labor is streamlining a large part of what they considered…

The general public does not know how to identify or care about the pipes in the walls. They do care when they bust and cause tens of thousands of dollars of damage. Thats why they hire someone with a keen eye to it to act on their behalf.

The general public does not know how to identify or care about good code. They do care when their data gets leaked or their computer gets hacked or their phone gets ransomware. That’s why they hire software engineers, who are supposed to care about the quality of the code they ship.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#246

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Here's the crux of it: if you want fast and cheap today, you have to choose AI. There is no cheaper, faster option. The article completely fails to mention this very damning fact about the state of the art. Slop is the future if you need it now and don't want to spend money.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#247

Post by dang »

Fraterkes wrote: post #217
dang wrote: post #130

The authors updated their title so I've updated it here too. Previous title was "Good code will still win" - but it was leading to too much superficial discussion based entirely on the phrase "good code" in the title. It's amazing how titles do that! (Confession: "good code will still win" was my suggestion- IIRC they originally had "Is AI slop the future?". You win some you lose some.)

Never considered that the mods of this site are literally discussing with the people heading yc companies how to game their hn-titles for better interaction. How naive I am.

We discuss these things all the time with people who email us whether they head yc companies or not.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#248

Post by keybored »

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 a Venus v.s. Mars developer trope at this point.

> 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 on their product faster.

That’s fine for people argue those things.

My criticisms of AI are mainly

1. The principle of the GenAI approach

2. Political

The first point is about how stupid the GenAI approach is (I could link to the arguments). But I have left open the door for pure results, i.e. demonstrating that it (despite my belief) works in practice. So this is not about craftmanship.

I’ve previously commented that I would respect a more principled approach even though it takes my craft.[1]

> Personally, I fall into the first camp.

Of course you do. Because...

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

In these dichotomies the author typically puts himself forward as the pragmatist and the other side as the ones who care about things that are just irrelevant to the purchasing decision or whatever.

But the AI haters have made real arguments against AI, against the people behind AI, and so on. It’s not a matter of vibes. So maybe respond to those arguments? We don’t need another armchair lesson in psychological inclinations.

Be a pragmatist for all I care. But beware of the bloodless pragmatist who only sees what is, essentially, instant product gratification and not what comes after, or from the sides, or from below.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47358696

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#249

Post by DanHulton »

We've been here before. Outsourcing of coding was really big for a while, until the reality of that situation caught up with those who practiced it - if you were saving a bundle on outsourcing your coding work, you were only saving money _now._ Down the line, you'd have to pay extra for someone competent to re-implement the work with an eye to quality.

(Sure, there were good outsourcing shops, but you didn't tend to save too much with them, since they knew they were good and charged appropriately.)

"Slop" ai-generated code is the same tradeoff as cheap outsourcing shops. You move quicker and cheaper now, but there will come a day when code quality will dip low enough that it will be difficult enough to make new changes that a refocus on quality becomes not just worthwhile, but financially required as well.

(And you may argue that you're using ai-generated code, but are maintaining a high code quality, and so for you this day will never come and you might be right! But you're the "good outsourcing shop", and you're not "saving" nearly as much time or money as those just sloppin' it up these days, so you're not really the issue, I'd argue.)

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