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Slop is not necessarily the future

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Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#321

Post by jimbokun »

doug_durham wrote: post #232
latexr wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 whi…

I agree with OP's distinction. However just because you see software as a means to an ends, doesn't mean that you don't feel that quality and craft are unimportant. You can see the "craft" oriented folks as being obsessed with the form of their software. A "craft" oriented engineer might rewrite a perfectly functioning piece of software to make it what they perceive to be "easier to reason about". I consider most sof…

With bad code it’s often almost impossible to improve the functionality or correctness or performance of the code, without first rewriting parts of it.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#322

Post by jimbokun »

mbesto wrote: post #181
nocman wrote: 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…

Now imagine how much they would make if their software was good.

Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code. They have to because bugs, bad performance, outages, vulnerabilities have very direct and immediate costs for them. I know Amazon and Microsoft have their critics but I bet they are also better than we give them credit for.

There are factors besides software quality that affect their success. But running bad software certainly isn’t going to help.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#323

Post by blanched »

jfreds wrote: post #201
jumploops wrote: post #153

“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!

My issue with this is that a simple design can set you up for failure if you don’t foresee and account for future requirements. Every abstraction adds some complexity. So maybe the PoC skips all abstractions. Then we need to add a variant to something. Well, a single if/else is simpler than an abstract base class with two concrete implementations. Adding the 3rd as another if clause is simpler than refactoring all of…

I’m aware I’m about to be “that guy”, but I really like how Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” clarifies simplicity here. In that model, what you’re describing is easy, not simple.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#324

Post by jimbokun »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #307
MrRadar wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 quality of the product. They get real nice paychecks, benefits and put dinner on the table…

Have you seen large consumer products’ codebases?… Companies like Google are tiniest exceptions when it comes to code gatekeeping and quality.

Funny how the biggest, most profitable software companies emphasize code quality.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#325

Post by tehjoker »

I don’t know if this prediction is wrong, it might well be right, but the basis for this prediction is “market forces” without (a) an analysis showing the advantage for sets of market participants or (b) fundamental scientific reasoning why the code will improve to that degree. Without those two things it’s just wishful thinking.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#326

Post by jimbokun »

ttamslam wrote: post #99
nocman wrote: 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…

> 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 quickly, and is obviously created by people the care deeply about the quality of the product they produce (you know, the kind that acutally read bug reports, and fix problems quickly). I would classify all of those as…

The single line single character program, after a certain level of complexity, will no longer have the same behavior because it cannot be maintained.

If it’s software that will never be modified, sure it doesn’t matter.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#327

Post by yoyohello13 »

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…

It seems pretty clear to me that the AI coding revolution has not lead to better software. In fact, software seems more brittle than ever now.

Code quality is absolutely important. It’s just not a quality that’s easily visible to a layman. I can definitely feel the difference as a user when a program has been crafted with care.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#328

Post by jimbokun »

delbronski wrote: post #216
nocman wrote: 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…

Garbage software that is slow as a dog has been winning. While we’ve been obsessing over our craft and arguing about what makes software beautiful, slow crappy software has taken over the world. Quality of code is just not that important of a concept anymore for the average web developer building some saas tool. React code was always crap anyways. Unless you are building critical systems like software that powers a p…

I believe a lot if large software companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft have very high quality code. Past a certain level of complexity, bad code will just collapse under the weight of its low quality.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#329

Post by christophilus »

jimbokun wrote: post #322
mbesto wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Now imagine how much they would make if their software was good. Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code. They have to because bugs, bad performance, outages, vulnerabilities have very direct and immediate costs for them. I know Amazon and Microsoft have their critics but I bet they are also better than we give them credit for. There are factors besides software quality that affect…

> Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code

Not the impression I get these days.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#330

Post by yoyohello13 »

9dev wrote: post #278
Animats wrote: post #35

Meanwhile, the complexity of the average piece of software is drastically increasing. ... The stats suggest that devs are shipping more code with coding agents. The consequences may already be visible: analysis of vendor status pages [3] shows outages have steadily increased since 2022, suggesting software is becoming more brittle. We've already seen a large-scale AWS outage because of this. It could get much worse.…

While I also view this development critically, why do you assume AI will be unable to fix the issues eventually?

Whether they can or not in the future is kind of irrelevant. The fact is that right now they are not able to, but many are using them as if they are.
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