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Slop is not necessarily the future

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Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#471

Post by shimman »

mycall wrote: post #450
yoyohello13 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you can actually do this, please sell your services. You will become a multi-millionaire overnight if you can provide a workflow that doesn't result in mass hallucinations or incorrect suggestions you're able to do something no other LLM company can.

The more common use case is that these tools struggle immensely on anything outside the happy path.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#472

Post by pixl97 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #225
fnoef wrote: 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.

>and there's plenty enough of them for a viable market, at least for the highest-quality producers.

So what you're saying is "someone" can make a living doing it.

What you're not saying is "you" can make a living doing it.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#473

Post by pixl97 »

DanHulton wrote: post #249

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…

>Outsourcing of coding was really big for a while,

I can promise you outsourcing of coding is still huge.

This said, companies have changed it up a bit, instead of hiring a outsourcing shop, they'll setup their own branch in LCOL countries.

India, Portugal, a few different countries in eastern Europe are all rather large software producing countries for US companies.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#474

Post by lelanthran »

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 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.

Among the vocal devs, maybe. Most devs choose a trade-off between #1 and #2, leaning heavily towards #2.

And the reason is, very few people actually want to the output of their labour to be poor, no matter how superficially good it looks.

I find, like the poster below me said, the people presenting the false dichotomoty you present are desperate to legitimise their production of lovecraftian code horrors.

It's a trick, a verbal one usually, that people who espouse woo and who know that they are BSing, use to sort of "borrow" legitimacy from a field that is already respectable. Like... ghost-believers referring to themselves as occult scientists. They throw in the word "scientist" in there to borrow the legitimacy and respectability of actual scientists[1].

Throwing in "user delight" or "useful to the user" into their arguments for vibe-coding is their way of borrowing the respectability of actual developers, who had always been developing for an actual user, and who cared about their user enough to target that specific use-case.

The folks in #1 are simply borrowing what they can from the respectable practitioners to paper over the fact that all they care about is themselves, not actual users.

The clear majority of them are hoping to hit a jackpot; the borrowed terms, phrases and words is simply a poor attempt to cover up their naked greed.

---------------------------

[1] There's probably a joke in there somewhere about "software engineers" :-)

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#475

Post by mpweiher »

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.…

> AI coders, as currently implemented, don't have a design-level representation of what they're doing other than the prompt history and the code itself.

That new design-level representation will be code.

It will need to be code, because prompts, while dense, are not nearly deterministic enough.

It will need to be much higher level code, because current code, while deterministic, is not nearly dense enough.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#476

Post by 9rx »

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…

> The people who typically have the most negative things to say about AI fall into camp #2

I think more often they simply picked the wrong programming language as a target. In my experience, AI is especially bad at writing Typescript/Javascript, which happens to overlap with the most widely used language. I have negative things to say about AI too when developing in that ecosystem. If I only ever used AI in that ecosystem I'd probably tell you it is useless with the rest of them.

But my daily work sees me working in more than one language and when I am in some other language environments I have no reservations about AI whatsoever. AI vs good code is no longer even at odds with each other. In those certain languages, the models write good, stable, production-ready code pretty much all the time. It is really quite amazing.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#478

Post by kusokurae »

haspok wrote: post #449
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"?...

Be very careful who sources your pacemaker.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#479

Post by pron »

zozbot234 wrote: post #445
pron wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not completely wrong if you're interested in a throwaway codebase. It is completely wrong if what you want is a codebase you'll evolve over years. Agents are nowhere close to offering that (yet) unless a human is watching them like a hawk (closer than you'd watch another human programmer, because human programmers don't make such dangerous mistakes as frequently, and when they do make them, they don't hide them as well).

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#480

Post by yodsanklai »

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 API of the classes should be clean

That's an issue I have with Claude actually. I found it very good at breaking abstractions to get the job done. This is what I'd call slope (more so than the class internals).

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