Slop is not necessarily the future • Hacker News Board

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#91

Post by theossuary » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

Benjammer wrote: post #76

iamcalledrob wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sloppy technical design ends up manifesting in bugs, experiential jank, and instability. There are some types of software (e.g. websites especially), where a bit of jank and is generally acceptable. Sessions are relatively short, and your users can reload the webpage if things stop working. The technical rigor of these codebases tends to be poor, but it's generally fine. Then there's software which is very sensitive…

> the quality really does matter. If this level of quality/rigor does matter for something like a game, do you think the market will enforce this? If low rigor leads to a poor product, won't it sell less than a good product in this market? Shouldn't the market just naturally weed out the AI slop over time, assuming it's true that "quality really does matter"? Or were you thinking about "matter" in some other sense th…

Yes, there's every reason to believe the market will weed out the AI slop. The problem is, just like with stocks, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. While we all wait for executives to learn that code rigor matters, we still have bills to pay. After a year when they start trying to hire people to clean up their mess, we'll be the ones having to shovel a whole new level of shit; and the choice will be between that and starving.

As someone who also falls into camp one, and absolutely loves that we have thinking computers now, I can also recognize that we're angling towards a world of hurt over the next few years while a bunch of people in power have to learn hard lessons we'll all suffer for.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#92

Post by nzeid » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

xnx wrote: post #9

If "good code" == "useful code", then yes. People forget that good engineering isn't "the strongest bridge", but the cheapest bridge that just barely won't fail under conditions.

I'd describe that as passable engineering.

Good engineering is building the strongest bridge within budget and time.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#93

Post by Topgamer7 » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

bombela wrote: post #36

GarnetFloride wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up Roman concrete. There are 2000 year old bridges and aqueducts still in use. We only recently figured out how to reproduce Roman concrete. We’d have more but a lot were blown up during WWII.

There is nothing special about roman concrete compared to moderns concrete. Modern concrete is much better The difference is that they didn't have rebar. And so they built gravity stable structures. Heavy and costly as fuck. A modern steel and concrete structure is much lighter and much cheaper to produce. It does mean a nodern structure doesn't last as long but also the roman stuff we see is what survived the test o…

I think you are incorrect. Compared to modern concrete, roman concrete was more poorly cured at the time of pouring. So when it began to weather and crack, un-cured concrete would mix with water and cure. Thus it was somewhat self healing.

Modern concrete is more uniform in mix, and thus it doesn't leave uncured portions.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#94

Post by couchand » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #56

clan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respect your opinion and especially your honesty. And at the same time I hope that you will some day be forced to maintain a project written by someone else with that mindset. Cruel, yes. But unfortunately schadenfreude is a real thing - I must be honest too. I have gotten to old for ship now, ask questions later projects.

I'm in camp 1 too. I've maintained projects developed with that mindset. It's fine! Your job is to make the thing work, not take on its quality as part of your personal identity. If it's harder to work with, it's harder to work with, it's not the end of the world. At least it exists, which it probably wouldn't have if developed with "camp 2" tendencies. I think camp 2 would rather see one beautiful thing than ten use…

I think camp 1 would rather see ten useless things than one useful thing.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#95

Post by imiric » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

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…

While creating good software is as much of an art as it is a science, this is not why the craft is important. It is because people who pay attention to detail and put care into their work undoubtedly create better products. This is true in all industries, not just in IT.

The question is how much does the market value this, and how much it should value it.

For one-off scripts and software built for personal use, it doesn't matter. Go nuts. Move fast and break things.

But the quality requirement scales proportionally with how many people use and rely on the software. And not just users, but developers. Subjective properties like maintainability become very important if more than one developer needs to work on the codebase. This is true even for LLMs, which can often make a larger mess if the existing code is not in good shape.

To be clear, I don't think LLMs inevitably produce poor quality software. They can certainly be steered in a good direction. But that also requires an expert at the wheel to provide good guidance, which IME often takes as much, if not more, work than doing it by hand.

So all this talk about these new tools replacing the craft of programming is overblown. What they're doing, and will continue to do unless some fundamental breakthrough is reached, is make the creation of poor quality software very accessible. This is not the fault of the tools, but of the humans who use them. And this should concern everyone.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#96

Post by steveBK123 » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC

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 think type1 vs type2 dev requirements are also dependent on lifecycle / scale of your project, not just that its library / framework / mission critical software.

If you aren't even sure if your idea is even gonna work, whether you have PMF, or the company will be around next year.. then yeah.. speed over quality all day long.

On the other hand, I've never done the startup thing myself, and tend to work on software project with 10-20 year lifecycles. When code velocity maximalism leads to outages, excess compute cost and reputational issues.. good code matters again.

Re: "No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good your code is." Sonos very much could go out of business for agreeing with this line. I can tell you lots of people stopped buying their products because of how bad their code quality became with the big app change debacle. Lost over a decade of built up good will.

Apple is going through this lately with the last couple major OS releases across platforms and whatever is going on with their AI. This despite having incredible hardware.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#97

Post by tclancy » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC

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…

Now you done it! Yeah, one of the difficult things is being able to see both sides. At the end of the day, I happen to write code because that's how I can best accomplish the things I need to do with the minimum of effort. While I do take pride in elegance and quality of code, it is always a means to an end. When I start gold plating, I try to remind myself of the adage I learned in a marketing class: No one ever needed a drill, they needed the ability to make holes.

It is strange, but not really upsetting to me, that I am not particularly anal about the code Claude is generating for me anymore but that could also be a function of how low stakes the projects are or the fact nothing has exploded yet.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#98

Post by steveBK123 » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

nocman wrote: post #84

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…

> 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…

> The longer your product exists the more important the quality of the code will be. This obsession so many have with "get it out the door in 5 seconds" is only going to continue the parade of garbage software that is slow as a dog, and uses gigabytes of memory to perform simple tasks.

Exactly. A lot of devs optimizing for whether the feature is going to take a day or an hour, but not contemplating that it's going to be out in the wild for 10 years either way. Maybe do it well once.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#99

Post by ttamslam » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

nocman wrote: post #84

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…

> 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 "capabilities and limitations of your product"

I read OPs "good code" to mean "highly aesthetic code" (well laid out, good abstractions, good comments, etc. etc.), and in that sense I agree no customer who's just using the product actually cares about that.

Another definition of "good code" is probably "code that meets the requirements without unexpected behavior" and in that sense of course end users care about good code, but you could give me two black boxes that act the same externally, one written as a single line , single character variables, etc. etc. etc. and another written to be readable, and I wouldn't care so long as I wasn't expected to maintain it.

Re: Slop is not necessarily the future

#100

Post by paxys » Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 7:02 PM UTC

nocman wrote: post #84

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…

> 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…

And yet somehow the shittiest buggiest software ends up being the most popular.

Look through the list of top apps in mobile app stores, most used desktop apps, websites, SaaS, and all other popular/profitable software in general and tell me where you see users rewarding quality over features and speed of execution.