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Slop is not necessarily the future

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Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#441

Post by carlosjobim »

davnicwil wrote: post #195
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…

I keep seeing this idea repeated, but I don't accept the dichotomy between those who care about 'crafting code' and those who care about 'building products' as though they are opposite points on a spectrum. To me, the entire point of crafting good code is building a product with care in the detail. They're inseparable. I don't think I've ever in my life met someone who cared a lot about code and technology who didn't…

Millions of companies work out of spreadsheets, which is incredibly low quality and inefficient code by programming standards (not Excel, but the spreadsheet itself).

Would those companies be better off just using pen and paper? Because "craft code" programmers don't have time for this, and not all companies can pay for bespoke software. Well, maybe now they can, with AI "slop".

Likewise, should people who don't have the skills or means to cook delicious and nutritious meals just starve without food? Or is it okay that they eat something which isn't perfect?

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#442

Post by kode-targz »

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. Yea, idk about that one. They definitely did care in the past. They had to if they wanted to get users. But they've stopped caring a good while ago. Especially Microsoft. The costs that bad code would bring them is lower than the cost of developping good code, because they can mostly rely on monopolies and anti-competitive practices for user retention. Their users are more like hostages than anything else.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#443

Post by chunkyguy »

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…

> You treat your code as a means to an end to make a product for a user.

This sounds more like a product owner not a developer

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#445

Post by zozbot234 »

pron wrote: post #440
zozbot234 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agents are about as good as a random choice in picking the right answer, and there's typically only one right answer. That's realistically because they aren't even trying to answer that question by thinking sensibly about the code. Working in a limited context with anything they do leaves them guessing and trying the first thing that might work. That's why they generally do a bit better when you explicitly ask them…

Yes, and I think there's a fundamental problem here. The big reason the "AI thought leadership" claim that AI should do well at coding is because there are mechanical success metrics like tests. Except that's not true. The tests cover the behaviour, not the structure. It's like constructing a building where the only tests are whether floorplans match the design. It makes catastrophic strctural issues easy to hide. Th…

> The big reason the "AI thought leadership" claim that AI should do well at coding is because there are mechanical success metrics like tests.

I mean, if you properly define "do well" as getting a first draft of something interesting that might or might not be a step towards a solution, that's not completely wrong. A pass/fail test is verified feedback of a sort, that the AI can then do quick iteration on. It's just very wrong to expect that you can get away with only checking for passing tests and not even loosely survey what the AI generated (which is invariably what people do when they submit a bunch of vibe-coded pull requests that are 10k lines each or more, and call that a "gain" in productivity).

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#446

Post by SwtCyber »

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…

Most real-world work sits somewhere in the middle

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#447

Post by SwtCyber »

advael wrote: post #379

At this point I can't help but conclude that to a certain class of writers, "economic incentives" are a form of benevolent god who will surely, inevitably make things better in directions they care about, and those who believe this also believe the overwhelming and constant evidence to the contrary of their position is just a temporary anomaly Whatever the hell economics was supposed to do, right now it seems to be c…

Whatever system you design (market, regulated, hybrid) it still ends up creating incentives that shape behavior

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#448

Post by agentultra »

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…

True. I’ve never bought a piece of commercial software and wanted to inspect the source first before making that decision.

But I will demand my money back or sue you if your crappy code leaks my personal information, destroys my property, performs worse than advertised, or otherwise harms me in some way.

There was sloppy code before LLMs. It’s what they were trained on. And it’s why they generate slop.

All that code that was rushed out to meet an arbitrary deadline made up by the sales team, written by junior and lazy senior developers, pushed by the, “code doesn’t matter,” folks. Code written by the enterprise architecture astronauts with a class hierarchy deeper than the Mariana Trench. A few years down the line you get bloated, slow, hard to maintain spaghetti piles of dung. Windows rendering text that stutter when you scroll them. Virtual keyboards that take seconds to pop up. Browser tabs that take more available memory than was available to send astronauts to the moon and back.

When humans write it you generally have a few people on a team who are concerned with these things. They try to reign in the slop generating, “always be shipping,” people. You need a mix of both. Because each line of code is a liability as much as it’s a new feature.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#449

Post by haspok »

reese_john wrote: post #27

Why build each new airplane with the care and precision of a Rolls-Royce? In the early 1970s, Kelly Johnson and I [Ben Rich] had dinner in Los Angeles with the great Soviet aerodynamicist Alexander Tupolev, designer of their backfire Bear bomber. 'You Americans build airplanes like a Rolex watch,' he told us. 'Knock it off the night table and it stops ticking. We build airplanes like a cheap alarm clock. But knock it…

Let me highlight this part:

> Everything was ruthlessly sacrificed to cut costs, including pilot safety.

If we translate this analogy back to AI driven software development, what would be the equivalent of "pilot safety"?...

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#450

Post by mycall »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #330
9dev wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tend to disagree. When guiding AI through many rounds of code review, it can self correct if shown where general issues exist. It does take practice for using the language of the model, i.e. drift instead of issues. Human in the loop is good enough to produce useful and accurate code today.
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