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Slop Terrifies Me
- PlatoIsADisease 7mo ago>What if the future of computing belongs not to artisan developers or Carol from Accounting, but to whoever can churn out the most software out the fastest? What if good enough really is good enough for most people? Sounds like the cost of everything goes down. Instead of subscription apps, we have free Fdroid apps. Instead of only the 0.1% commissioning art, all of humanity gets to commission art. And when we do pay for things, instead of an app doing 1 feature well, we have apps do 10 features well with integration. (I am living this, instead of shipping software with 1 core feature, I can do 1 core feature and 6 different options for free, no change order needed)
- Ezhik 7mo agoThe future you describe seems closer to the "Carol from Accounting" future I am hoping for in the blog post. My worry is that cost of everything goes down just enough to price out of existence all of the artists the 0.1% used to commission, without actually letting all of humanity do the same.
- bartvk 7mo agoI deeply hate the people that use AI to poison the music, video or articles that I consume. However I really feel that it can possibly make software cheaper. A couple of years ago, I worked for an agency as a dev. I had a chat with one of the sales people, and he said clients asked him why custom apps were so expensive, when the hardware had gotten relatively cheap. He had a much harder time selling mobile apps. Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser and have no control over.
- tonyedgecombe 7mo ago>Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser and have no control over. There has been no shortage of mobile apps, Apple frequently boasts that there are over 2 million of them in the App Store. I have little doubt there will be more, whether any of the extra will be decent remains to be seen.
- vrighter 7mo agoai is trained on the stuff already written. Software has been taking a nosedive for ages (ex, committing to shipping something in 6 months before one even figures out what to put in it). If anything shit will get worse due to the deskilling being caused by ai.
- skzizjj 7mo agoThis is just the outsourcing argument all over again. Maybe the degrees of difference matters this time?
- wtetzner 7mo agoI kinda feel like we're at a point where it would be much more valuable to have higher quality software than more software.
- andrewstuart 7mo agoI use AI/LLMs hard for my programming. They allow me to do work I could never have done before. But there’s no chance at all of an LLM one shotting anything that I aim to build. Every single step in the process is an intensely human grind trying to understand the LLM and coax it to make the thing I have in mind. The people who are panicking aren’t using this stuff in depth. If they were, then they would have no anxiety at all. If only the LLM was smart enough to write the software. I wish it could. It can’t, nor even close. As for web browsers built in a few hours. No. No LLM is coming anywhere new at building a web browser in a few hours. Unless your talking about some super simple super minimal toy with some of the surface appearance of a web browser.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo agoThis has been my experience. I tend to use chats, in a synchronous, single-threaded manner, as opposed to agents, in an asynchronous way. That’s because I think of the LLM as a “know-it-all smartass personal assistant”; not an “employee replacement.” I just enjoy writing my own software. If I have a tool that will help me to lubricate the tight bits, I’ll use it.
- Tade0 7mo agoSame. I hit Tab a lot because even though the system doesn't actually understand what it's doing, it's really good at following patterns. Takes off the mental load of checking syntax. Occasionally of course it's way off, in which case I have to tell it to stfu ("snooze"). Also it's great at presenting someone else's knowledge, as it doesn't actually know facts - just what token should come after a sequence of others. The other day I just pasted an error message from a system that I wasn't familiar with and it explained in detail what the problem was and how to solve it - brilliant, just what I wanted.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago> The other day I just pasted an error message from a system that I wasn't familiar with and it explained in detail what the problem was and how to solve it That’s probably the single most valuable aspect, for me.
- naiv 7mo ago[flagged]
- fancyfredbot 7mo ago> You get AI that can make you like 90% of a thing! 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't. Based on the Adobe stock price the market thinks AI slop software will be good enough for about 20% of Adobe users (or Adobe will need to make its software 20% cheaper, or most likely somewhere between). Interestingly workday, which is possibly slightly simpler software more easily replicable using coding agents is about the same (down 26%).
- twoodfin 7mo agoThe bear case for Workday is not that it gets replicated as slop, but that its “user base” becomes dominated by agents. Agents don’t care about any of Workday’s value-adds: Customizable workflows, “intuitive” experiences, a decent mobile app. Agents are happy to write SQL against a few boring databases.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- beardyw 7mo agoI think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects. A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
- Muromec 7mo agoIt's regression to the mean in action. Everethyng eventually collapses into olygarhy and wevwill simply joing the unpriviliged rest in their misery. Likely with few wars civil or not here and there
- 9dev 7mo agoIt's not oligarchy, it's feudalism. I wholeheartedly recommend you buying a new keyboard, by the way.
- lm2s 7mo agoYes, that’s why they are on the race to building the very advanced robots. To prevent the violence towards them.
- satisfice 7mo agoThat is exactly the motivation. The problem with being a billionaire is you still have to associate with poor people. But imagine a world where your wealth completely insulates you from the resentful poor.
- gib444 7mo agoHow does a billionaire have to associate with poor people? They can live in a complete bubble: house in the hills, driven by a chauffeur, private jets, private islands for holidays etc...?
- outime 7mo ago> 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't. I feel like long before LLMs, people already didn't care about this. If anything software quality has been decreasing significantly, even at the "highest level" (see Windows, macOS, etc). Are LLMs going to make it worse? I'm skeptical, because they might actually accelerate shipping bug fixes that (pre-LLMs) would have required more time and management buy-in, only to be met with "yeah don’t bother, look at the usage stats, nobody cares".
- intrasight 7mo agoIf it can enable very small teams to deliver big apps, I do think the quality will increase.
- KurSix 7mo agoI don't think LLMs are the root cause or even a dramatic inflection point. They just tilt an already-skewed system a little further toward motion over judgment
- jt2190 7mo agoEvery successful software project reaches an equilibrium between utility for its operators and bugs, and that point very rarely settles at 0% bugs [1]. When software operators tolerate bugs they’re signaling that they’re willing to forego the fix in exchange for other parts of the feature that work and that they need. The idea that consumers will somehow not need the features that they rely on anymore is completely wrong. That leaves the tolerable bugs, but those were always part of the negotiation: Coding agents doesn’t change that one bit. Perhaps all it does it allow more competitors to peel away those minority groups of users who are blocked by certain unaddressed bugs. Or maybe it gets those bugs fixed because it’s cheaper to do so.
- hereme888 7mo ago"terrified".... overused word. As a man I literally can't relate. I get terrified when I see a shark next to me in the ocean. I get impatient when code is hard to debug.
- KurSix 7mo agoWe're pretty good at naming fear when it has a physical trigger. We're much worse at naming the unease that comes from watching something you care about get quietly hollowed out over time. That doesn't make it melodrama, just a different category of discomfort.
- mystraline 7mo agoIts existential dread, of being useless and of not being able to thrive. Its being compared to that of a slop machine, and billionaires claiming that its better than you are in all ways. Its having integrity in your work, but the LLM slop-machines can lie and go "You're actually right (tells more lies)". It all comes down to that LLMs serve to 'fix' the trillion dollar problem: peoples wages. Especially those engineers, developers, medical, and more.
- xandrius 7mo agoI wonder how people like you would have fared even just 100y ago, if typing on a keyboard with your own fingers is so foundational to your identity.
- direwolf20 7mo agoAsk a horse buggy driver and find out.
- mystraline 7mo ago"People like (me)".. And what are me and people like me like? How's about you say what you're comparing me and people like me to. In my experience, people who use terms like "You people" are just using that as a placeholder for racism, sexism, or ableism. Which is it in your case? And 100 years ago, when industry took over something, the new thing still needed people. But thats not a hard economic law - thats just what happened before. There is no guarantee of that observation to still hold true.
- intrasight 7mo ago> I'm terrified that our craft will die, and nobody will even care to mourn it. "Terrified" is a strong word for the death of any craft. And as long as there are thousands that love the craft, then it will not have died.
- halapro 7mo agoI think that unlike physical art, there aren't actually enough people who recognize or even care about your craft. Sure the codebase is super maintainable and that half-pixel line ties things up beautifully, but nobody cares other than your peers. Your peers won't give you a salary.
- blaze33 7mo agoAs much as we speak about slop in the context of AI, slop as the cheap low-quality thing is not a new concept. As lots of people seem to always prefer the cheaper option, we now have single-use plastic ultra-fast fashion, plastic stuff that'll break in the short term, brittle plywood furniture, cheap ultra-processed food, etc. Classic software development always felt like a tailor-made job to me and of course it's slow and expensive but if it's done by professionals it can give excellent results. Now if you can get crappy but cheap and good enough results of course it'll be the preferred option for mass production.
- qwerpy 7mo ago> brittle plywood furniture If only it was plywood, at least it'd be solid and sturdy. These days it's particleboard, which is much worse than plywood. Similar concept, but now made out of sawdust and glue instead of woodchips and glue that are alternately laid down in different orientations layer by layer for increased strength. Particleboard chips much easier, breaks down much faster with moisture, and can't hold screws in. But it's very cheap, can be made very smooth, and is light. Agree with the general sentiment though.
- Der_Einzige 7mo agoOur paper on removing AI slop got accepted to ICLR 2026, and it's under consideration for an IgNobel prize: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 Our definition of slop (repetitive characteristic language from LLMs) is the original one as articulated by the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023. Folks trying to redefine it today to mean "lazy LLM outputs I don't like" should have chosen a different word.
- suddenlybananas 7mo agoWords expand meanings all the time and frankly I don't think your narrow definition of slop was ever a common one.
- direwolf20 7mo agoSlop is food scraps fed to pigs. Folks trying to redefine it in 2022–2023 as "repetitive characteristic language from LLMs" should have chosen a different word. A computer is a person employed to do arithmetic.
- Der_Einzige 7mo agoSloppy joes is either a food item or a slur against the previous democratic president. Checkmate.
- zbentley 7mo agoI was disappointed that your paper devoted less than a sentence in the introduction to qualifying "slop" before spending many pages quantifying it. The definitions you're operating under are mentioned thus: > characteristic repetitive phraseology, termed “slop,” which degrades output quality and makes AI-generated text immediately recognizable. (abstract) > ... some patterns occur over 1000× more frequently in LLM text than in human writing, leading to the perception of repetition and over-use – i.e. "slop". (introduction) And that's ... it, I think. No further effort is visible towards a definition of the term, nor do the background citations propose one that I could see (I'll admit to skimming them, though I did read most of your paper--if I missed something, let me know). That might be suitable as an operating definition of "slop" to explain the techniques in your paper, but neither your paper nor any of your citations defend it as the common definition of an established term. Your paper's not making an incorrect claim per se, rather, it's taking your definition of "slop" for granted without evidence. That doesn't bode well for the rigor of the rest of the paper. Like, look: I get that this is an extremely fraught and important/popular area of research, and that your approach has "antislop" in the name. That's all great; I hope your approach is beneficial--truly. But you aren't claiming a definition of slop in your paper; you're just assuming one. Then you're coming here and asserting a definition citing "the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023" and asserting redefinition-after-the-fact, both of which are extraordinary claims that require evidence. Again, not only do I think that mis-definition is untrue, I also think that you're not actually defining "slop" (the irony of my emphasizing that in a not-just-x-but-y sentence is not lost on me). I don't know which of the authors you are, but Ravid, at least, should know better: this is not how you establish terminology in academic writing, nor how you defend it.
- Havoc 7mo agoThe slop is sad but a mild irritation at most. It's the societal level impact of recent advances that I'd call "terrifying". There is a non-zero chance we end up with a "useless" class that can't compete against AI & machines - like at all, on any metric. And there doesn't seem to be much of a game plan for dealing with that without social fabric tearing
- danaris 7mo agoSome of us have a perfectly good game plan for that. It's called Universal Basic Income. It's just that many powerful people have a vested interest in keeping the rest of us poor, miserable, and desperate, and so do everything they can to fight the idea that anything can ever be done to improve the lot of the poor without destroying the economy. Despite ample empirical evidence to the contrary.
- alehlopeh 7mo agoWell that sounds less like a plan and more like a pipe dream.
- fragmede 7mo agoWe can (and should) provide for those among us who aren't able to provide for themselves, without also firing everyone in the welfare department. UBI is shit. People need to do something in order to recieve money, even if the something is begging on the side of the freeway or going into the welfare office to claim benefits. Magic money from the sky is not the answer.
- JKCalhoun 7mo agoI agree with you about magic money. Frequently downvoted when I put it forward but by and large I think that the human psyche needs to have a daily sense of having "accomplished something". Otherwise I suspect many of us will (reluctantly) drift off into lives that center around drinking alcohol, playing video games…
- 7mo ago
- KurSix 7mo agoI don't think craft dies, but I do think it retreats
- roxolotl 7mo agoLLM are an embodiment of the Pareto principle. Turns out that if you can get an 80% solution in 1% of the time no one gives a shit about the remaining 20%. I agree that’s terrifying. The existential AI risk crowd is afraid we’ll produce gods to destroy us. The reality is we’ve instead exposed a major weakness in our culture where we’ve trained ourselves to care nothing about quality but instead to maximize consumption. This isn’t news really. Content farms already existed. Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in 1985. Critiques of the culture exist way before that. But the reality of seeing the end game of such a culture laid bare in the waste of the data center buildout is shocking and repulsive.
- KurSix 7mo agoThe data center buildout feels obscene when framed this way. Not because computation is evil, but because we're burning planetary-scale resources to accelerate a culture that already struggles to articulate why quality matters at all
- direwolf20 7mo agoThere isn't nearly enough AI demand to make all of these projects turn a profit.
- kjkjadksj 7mo agoUnless you successfully make ai subscription an obligatory cost to pay for every employee in an org. Which they seem to be doing quite successfully considering enterprise sales activity. Successfull b2b salesmanship does not require a working and useful product. It just requires you to get these meetings with purchasers and show that other comparable orgs are buying your product. For example, at my last job I wasn’t sure if we were a microsoft shop or a google shop because we bought both of their products that did the same thing. Because that is just what you do when you are an org with 5 figure employee counts, you spend budget.
- slfnflctd 7mo agoVery well put, one of the more compelling insights I've seen about this whole situation. I feel like it gets at something I've been trying to say but couldn't find the right words for yet. Quality. Matters. It always has, and it always will. If you're telling yourself otherwise, you are part of a doomed way of thinking and will eventually be outcompeted by those who understand the implications of thinking further ahead. [ETA: Unfortunately, 'eventually' in this context could be an impossibly long time, or never, because people are irrational animals who too often prioritize our current feelings over everything else.]
- chung8123 7mo agoAI slop is similar to the cheap tools at harbor freight. Before we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were designed to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can just go to harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough for most people. 80% of good maybe reframed as 100% ok for 80% of the people. It is when you are in the minority that cares about or needs that last 20% where it is a problem because the 80% were subsidizing your needs by buying more than the need.
- direwolf20 7mo agoAnd then you have to buy it again next time because it broke. I've never killed a power tool. I don't use them that much but neither do you. And when you have a library of power tools in your shed and don't have to go out and buy one, you can do more things more quickly.
- snozolli 7mo agoBefore we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were designed to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can just go to harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough for most people. This just isn't true. First, cheap tools have always been around. I have a few that I've inherited from my grandfather and great-grandfather. They're junk and I keep them specifically to remind myself that consumer-oriented trash versions of better quality tools have always existed. Second, Harbor Freight is the only consumer-oriented tool retailer that seems to be consistently improving their product lines. Craftsman, which was the benchmark for quality, consumer-oriented hand tools, dropped off a cliff in terms of quality around the mid- to late-2000s. If you can afford professional-grade tools (Snap-On, Mac, Wera, Knipex, etc.) great. For the rest of us, Harbor Freight is the only retailer looking out for us. Their American- and Taiwanese-made tools are excellent. Their Chinese-made tools are good. Their Indian-made tools will get the job done, but it won't be pleasant. At least they give the consumer a range of options, unlike Snap-On, which gives you a payment plan.
- chung8123 7mo agoUsing tools broadly but things like torque wrenches, AC vacuum pumps, and other specialized tools have mostly been too expensive to buy. Now I can buy a cheap version and it works good enough for most cases. It is not cheaper even with buying the tools to do the work yourself. This is happening in other areas as well. The Chinese mini excavators and mini skid steers are changing what smaller landscape companies can do. They are not as good as a Kubota but they are 1/2 the price and 80% as good.
- frankie_t 7mo agoIf slop doesn't get better, it would mean that at least I get to keep my job. In the areas where the remaining 10% don't matter, maybe I won't. I'm struggling to come up with an example of such software outside of one-off scripts and some home automation though. The job is going to be much less fun, yes, but I won't have to learn from scratch and compete with young people in a different area (and which I will enjoy less, most likely). So, if anything slop gives me hope.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoI find working with LLMs much more fun and frictionless comprated to the drudgery of boring glue code or tracking down nongeneralizable version-specific workarounds in github issues etc. Coding LLMs let you focus on the domain of you actual problem instead of the low level stumbling blocks that just create annoyance without real learning.
- direwolf20 7mo agoFocusing on your problem means focusing on minimizing that stuff.. with LLMs it will fester.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoNot in my experience so far. But if it becomes a problem, I'll reconsider.
- RalfWausE 7mo ago[dead]
- 1potatonagger 7mo agoYou don't want a global authoritarian jewish utopia run by a digital sanhedran? How else will the elite people get robot blowjobs in their flying cars on their way to their transhuman surgery appointments? Won't somebody please think of the juden?!
- int_19h 7mo agoDo you want to live under Harkonnens? Because that's how you get Harkonnens.
- drzaiusx11 7mo agoI have deep concerns surrounding LLM-based systems in general, which you can see discussed in my other threads and comments. However in this particular article's case, I feel the same fears outlined largely predate mass LLM adoption. If you substitute "artificial intelligence" with offshored labor ("actually indo-asians" meme moniker) you have some parallels: cheap spaghetti code that "mostly works", just written by farms of humans instead of farms of GPUs. The result is largely the same. The primary difference is that we've now subsidized (through massive, unsustainable private investment) the cost of "offshoring" to basically zero. Obviously that has its own set of problems, but the piper will need to be paid eventually...
- kjkjadksj 7mo agoCost of offshoring to ai isn’t zero. Chatgpt and such are businesses. They charge subscriptions. In fact whatever cost you’d pay offshoring to india is probably where chatgpt is hoping to price its subscriptions eventually. Anything less is just leaving money on the table for chatgpt.
- drzaiusx11 7mo agoI agree it's greater than zero, however, like a good drug dealer you get the first few hits for free (or at cost in the most charitable interpretation of current subscriptions.) I get the feeling that we're not even close to paying for the _actual_ costs of our frontier GenAI models at current usage levels, with or without subscriptions in the picture. AFAICT we're all using a highly subsidized product, made possible by private capital on the promise of future returns that may or may not materialize. Outside of a few vertically integrated companies (Google with their custom TPUs, possibly AWS with theirs) LLM companies like OpenAI have to rely on massive data centers via MSFT, Oracle and Nvidia deals to train their frontier models to stay competitive. Theres a lot to pay for when wielding 20 Gigawatts of compute on other folks' machines. For OpenAI we're talking 4+ trillion USD so far with no signs of slowing. That's a hell of a lot of subscriptions to make up for that spend and they have a long climb ahead of them to get there. Maybe their "killer app" will be their new "erotica" models, who knows (porn has lead several tech initiatives in the past.) But I wouldnt bet money on it working out for them. It's estimated that OpenAI spends 3 USD for every 1 it makes. Obviously that will have to change to make them an actually viable company in the long term. In the end, I see the most likely scenario is we're left with the few large players like Google. They're the ones that have any hope on "winning" the GenAI race, as they're in the best position to not rely on someone else's shovels. All that said offshoring started out with similar promises to GenAI and some things panned out with offshoring and others didn't. Only time will tell what shakes out of all this mess. I just hope we get a sane readjustment of expectations for GenAI before our next economic collapse (the massive GenAI investment has helped prop up our economy to an extent, at least in the US) In short, a business exists to turn a profit and OpenAI has yet to do so. Perhaps they eventually will and be the new "offshore" solution going forward as you imply, but just like actually moving your technical talent overseas it comes with a significant amount of tradeoffs to consider (tradeoffs already outlined in parent and other posts on this thread.)
- secretsatan 7mo agoI was watching a youtube video the other day where the guy was complaining his website was dropping off the google search results. Long story short, he reworded it according to advice from Gemini, the more he did it, the better it performed, but he was reflecting on how the website no longer represented him. Soon, we'll all just be meatpuppets, guided by AI to suit AI.
- masswerk 7mo agoActually Louis Rossmann finding himself forced to convert his genuine advocacy for repair into textual convenience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc
- secretsatan 7mo agoThat’s the one
- ReptileMan 7mo agoMeh. Slop is not danger. Because in software lines of code quantity does not have quality on its own. Or if it has it is not a good quality. And bad software costs money. The problem with temu for the west is not that the things sold there are bad. The real problem rose in the last 2-3 years when they become good.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoCommercial ventures already had to care exactly to the extent that they are financially motivated by competition forces and by regulation. In my experience coding agents are actually better at doing the final polish and plugging in gaps that a developer under time pressure to ship would skip.
- fragmede 7mo agoThe creme rises to the top. If someone's shit-coded program hangs and crashes frequently, in this day and age, we don't have to put up. with it any longer. That lazy half-assed feature that everyone knows sucks but we're forced to use it anyway? The competition just vibe coded up a hyper-specific version of that app that doesn't suck for everyone involved. We start looking at who's requiring what. What's an interface and what's required to use it. If there's an endpoint that I can hit, but someone has a better, more polished UI, that users prefer, let the markets decide. My favorite pre-LLM thing in this area is Flighty. It's a flight tracking app that takes available data and presents it in the best possible wway. Another one is that EU border visa residency app that came thru here a couple of months ago. Standards for interchange formats have now become paramount. API access is another place where things hinge on.
- TaupeRanger 7mo agoRight. If the "slop" is truly "90% as good" and that 10% actually matters to people, then they won't use the slop. If the 10% doesn't matter, there's probably a reason for that.
- tim333 7mo ago>What if AI stops getting better and what if people stop caring? Seems an unlikely problem. It'll get better, which may cause it's own problems.
- hgs3 7mo agoWhy is slop assumed inevitable? These models are plagiarization and copyright laundering machines. We need a great AI model reset whereby all published works are assumed to opt-out of training and companies pay to train on your data. We've seen what AI can do, now fund the creators.
- amelius 7mo agoGood luck, there are too many forces working against that. Only big creative companies like Disney can play the game of making licensing agreements. And they are ok with it because it gives them an edge over smaller, less organized creators without a legal department. https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/news/disney-openai-sora-agreement/ https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/news/disney-openai-sora-agr...
- direwolf20 7mo agoWho's going to enforce that, exactly?
- slekker 7mo agoY' know there's this thing called a government
- direwolf20 7mo agoY' know it's owned by big corporate interests.
- slekker 7mo agoI mourn for the US :(
- wundersam 7mo agoThe terrifying part isn't obsolescence. It's mediocrity becoming the ceiling. AI produces code that technically runs but lacks the thoughtfulness that makes software maintainable or elegant. The "90% solution" ships because economic pressure rewards speed over quality. What haunts me: compilers don't make design decisions. IDEs don't choose architecture. AI does both, and most users accept those choices uncritically. We're already seeing juniors who've never debugged without a copilot. The author's real question: what if most people genuinely don't care about the last 10%? Not from laziness, but because "good enough" is cheaper and we're all exhausted. Dismissing this as "just another moral panic" feels too easy. The handcraft isn't dying because AI is too good. It's dying because mediocrity is profitable.
- djoldman 7mo agoNow that generative AI products are becoming more widely used, it's a little depressing how folks don't seem to view the world with a broad historical context. The "AI effect" on the world has many similarities to previous events and in many ways changes very little about how the world works. > I'm terrified of the good enough to ship—and I'm terrified of nobody else caring. For almost every product/service ever offered, it was possible to scale the "quality" of the offering while largely keeping the function or outcome static. In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements. This leads to folks (including me!!) to lament the quality of certain products/services. For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long. Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many. There is nothing surprising here, it's been this way for many years and will continue. Obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part it's best to assume the above.
- kryogen1c 7mo agoIt should also be noted that most companies that make high quality (last decades) low volume goods go out of business; people vote with their dollars and dont want the capex. Put another way, who here wants a car that costs more than their house? Or shoes that cost 2000$?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- doctorwho42 7mo agoOr, wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people are forced to buy the cheaper products. It's the age old paradigm of buying a pair of shoes/boots, the poor man keeps buying $20 shoes/boots that wear out in a year or two. The wealthy man looks perplexed and states, "this is why they are poor, they don't understand investing in a quality pair of shoes/boots... For a measly $100 they could buy a pair of shoes/boots that would last them 10+ years". But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest better quality purchases, because the money needs to be applied to other problems in their lives. I would argue that this is one contributing factor, outside of companies just chasing the lowest quality/cost, that contributes to crappier stuff.
- onion2k 7mo agoOne of the biggest problems with AI slop (the biggest problem) is that we aren't discerning or critical enough to ignore the bad stuff. It should be fine for people to use AI to generate tons of crap so long as people curate the good stuff to the top.
- wavemode 7mo agoSlop existed before AI came along. It's often lamented that the World Wide Web used to be controlled by indie makers, but now belongs to a handful of megacorp websites and ad networks pushing addictive content. But, the indie maker era was just a temporary market inefficiency, from before businesses fully knew how to harness the technology. I think software development has gone through a similar change. At one point software companies cared about software quality, but this too was just an idealist, engineer-driven market inefficiency. Eventually business leaders realized they can make just as much money (but make it faster) by shoveling out rushed, bloated, garbage software, since even though poor-quality software aggravates people, it doesn't aggravate enough for the average person to switch vendors over it. (Case in point - I'm regularly astounded at how buggy the YouTube app is on Android of all platforms. I have to force-kill it semi-regularly to get it working right. But am I gonna stop watching YouTube because of this? Admittedly, no, probably not.)
- direwolf20 7mo agoYou might install PipePipe or YouTube ReVanced, but they'd sooner ban you as a customer than improve their app quality.
- hdaz0017 7mo agoWe should have also been talking about "devops slop" since 2007! it's good enough we have heard this for how many decades?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- atomic128 7mo agoDr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Slop https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439
- shmerl 7mo agoAs it should.
- bitbasher 7mo ago> 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't. I would argue most never did. If you spend time in the startup world you quickly realize how little the average developer cares about craftsmanship or quality. The startup world is full of mantras like move fast and break things, or if you are not embarrassed by your mvp it’s not an mvp.
- kaicianflone 7mo agoI’m a systems person too, and I don’t see mediocrity as inevitable. The slop problem isn’t just model quality. It’s incentives and decision making at inference time. That’s why I’m working on an open source tool for governance and validation during inference, rather than trying to solve everything in pre training. Better systems can produce better outcomes, even with the same models.
- jbonatakis 7mo agoI agree completely, and I’m doing the same thing. Good tools that help produce better outcomes will have a multiplicative impact as models improve. What are you building?
- kaicianflone 7mo agoThe open source system I’m working on lets multiple agents propose, critique, and stake on decisions before a single action is taken. It runs at inference time rather than training time and is model agnostic. The goal is to make disagreement explicit and costly instead of implicit and ignored, especially in high stakes or autonomous workflows.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- b00ty4breakfast 7mo agoGenerative AI is completely in line with the rest of the industrial milieu; pumping out product as quickly and as cheaply as possible. "Good enough" is often the standard, even before the industrial mode, but the industrial mode allows "good enough" to compound exponentially until you've got an edifice of trash that continues tumbling downhill on sheer momentum and we all scramble to fix the thing in situ. This is how our world works and until it hits the proverbial wall, this is how it will continue to work because it's too big to be detoured or course-adjusted
- myth_drannon 7mo agoFrom The Free Press article: In a 1995 interview with Inc. magazine, author Kurt Vonnegut was asked what he thought about living in an increasingly digitized world. His response is so perfect that it’s worth reprinting in full: I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “OK, I’ll send you the pages.” Then I’m going down the steps, and my wife calls up, “Where are you going?” I say, “Well, I’m going to go buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in a closet.” And I say, “Hush.” So I go down the steps here, and I go out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of 47th Street and 2nd Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different. We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something
- int_19h 7mo agoAnd yet he uses a typewriter. Imagine how much more human interaction he'd have if he did it with old fashioned quills! And let's not even talk about the fact that the letter was industrially processed, driven by trucks alongside thousands of others, instead of delivered by hand by people walking the country.
- samiv 7mo agoWhat terrifies me is the total and utter potential disruption to our economies in a very rapid order. Software is just a proxy for the thing that we want which is data. The same way an electric drill is a proxy to a hole. Since it's impossible to sell holes there's a market for selling electric drills to make holes. A lot of economic activity is based on these proxies. Same in the software digital world. Even though it's data that were after many successful software businesses have been started to sell the tools, i.e. software products for people to make their digital "holes". Now imagine if you could just suddenly 3D print your electric drill. Or your frying pan. Or your garden shears. What would happen to the economiies based on selling these tools? Once you can prompt your way to any digital creation what happens to the economies based on making the digital tools? It's not there yet, but if/when it does it's going to be a complete economic restructuring that will affect many. Careers will be wiped out, livelihoods will be lost.
- whaleidk 7mo agoHopefully this does not count as being uncivil, I just want to cut through what feels like insanity to put my (and at least a few others’) feelings plainly: If you are one of those devs who heavily uses LLMs at work and you are in a position of relative authority, either as senior+ or something else, and you hand off your LLM code to others to review or “build off of”… we hate you. We don’t want to be your voluntold slop jannies. LLM over use and vibe coding is taking a fairly enjoyable job and making it insufferable. Now I have to sift through 3-10x more lines of code that are written in a non-human thought process using terrible naming schemes and try to find the bug… just to realize that the code isn’t even solving for the correct or underlying problem. Every time I have to interact with a co-workers LLM code, my tasks take weeks longer than they would have. This is including the ones who claim to be exerts in prompting and harnessing and whatever skibidi buzzword is out this week. You are not saving time, you only think you are because you don’t look closely at the output and send it off to your lowley janitors to deal with. And the people who claim to be running 20 or 30 AI tasks at once what are you even building? If you aren’t literally shipping the next Amazon that’s just embarrassing. I can not wait for people to wake from this bizarre mass psychosis. I already see co-workers context window getting smaller than free version ChatGPT in an incognito window.
- rglynn 7mo agoI think it's beneficial to hear this, as I've definitely been on the other side of this before now. So, thanks for sharing. As much as we can fault the technology and the hype around it, this as much a people problem as anything else. Before AI, this same problem happened with architecture/PoC to implementation hand-offs. AI is a new tool that a lot of us are still figuring out, but that doesn't excuse poor communication.
- iuufuri 7mo agoThat this person has a .jp address may be relevant. In my experience Americans are much more tolerant of “good enough” than, say, Japanese people. An American might even ship a high end final product with four figure price tag that literally was made with hot glue. (cough Grado) Whereas a Japanese business would rather just not ship in such a case. Look at the Nintendo, such as the 3d Mario games. Those things are polished to an insane degree that no American studio would bother with. Apple is exceptional in many ways and this is one of them. Microsoft, with “no taste”, is the standard American fare.
- npn 7mo agoTools exists so we can spend our time focusing on more important matter. AI is not any exception of that. Till this day even there exists IDEs with proper auto-complete suggestions (or editors with LSP support), there are still a lot of people prefer doing it in the old way (vim/emac/nano) and none of them get fired for that. Z3 exists but we still like to solve algorithms by hand. High level languages exists but C/C++ codes are still written every day, even asm is still used. On the brighter side of the issue, we now have ton of legacy projects written in obscure languages (COBOL, FORTRAN) that only some dozen people can maintain effectively, and those people are mostly at retirement age now. GenAI can solve that.
- gaigalas 7mo ago> I'm terrified that our craft will die, and nobody will even care to mourn it. Mourn it? Overall, people seem to hate tech workers in general (of all kinds). The death of the craft will not be mourned as a tragedy, it's already being celebrated as a triumph (whether it's true or not, doesn't matter). I must admit there's a part of me that wants it to die. I want people to remember what was good about it in retrospect, then realize there is no chance of ever getting it back. Permanent losses are important lessons.
- wise_blood 7mo agoIkea is great, though