16 ms·
Slop is not necessarily the future
- throwaway613746 6mo ago[dead]
- sloptile 6mo ago[flagged]
- vb-8448 6mo agoGood code wasn't winning even before the ai slop era! The pattern was always: ship fast, fix/document later, but when "later" comes "don't touch what is working". To date nothing changed yet, I bet it won't change even in the future.
- briantakita 6mo agoI was told by an exec...once a company or technology implements something and gets mindshare, the community (including companies) moves on. Competition is essentially dead for that segment given there is always outward growth. With that being said, AI enables smaller players to implement their visions with enough completeness to be viable. And with a hands off approach to code, the underlying technology mindshare does not matter as much.
- esafak 6mo agoIf that were true first movers would always win. Hotmail came before Gmail. Yahoo came before Google. Myspace came before Facebook. Et cetera. Of course it is best to avoid competition by creating a new (sub)category but category kings can change.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- mettamage 6mo agoI disagree, Electron showed the world that good code can be magnetic ... I'll see myself out
- vb-8448 6mo agoIt's a joke? (I'm not in the electron/js world and I don't get it)
- deathanatos 6mo ago& I have thus far made a large portion of my living off of fixing bad code "later". … but lately, the rate at which some dev with an LLM can just churn out new bad code has just shot through the roof. I can still be struggling to pick apart the last piece of slop, trying to figure out "okay, if someone with a brain had written this, what would the inputs & outputs be?" and "what is it that production actually needs and relies on, and what causes problems, and how can we get the code from point A to point B without more outages"; but in the meantime, someone has spit out 8 more modules of the same "quality". So sure, the basic tenants haven't changed, but these days I feel like I'm drowning in outages & bugs.
- ares623 6mo agoThe irony is that "good" code and good documentation have top priority now in most orgs. For decades the best developers have been screaming about good code and documentation but leadership couldn't give a fuck. But now that their favorite nepobaby is here, now it's the most important thing all of a sudden.
- seniorThrowaway 6mo agothis submission is basically an ad
- 7e 6mo agoNone of this is true. Models will soon scale to several million tokens of context. That, combined with the combined experience of millions of feedback cycles, will make software a solved problem for machines, even as humans remain dumb. Yes, even complex software. Complex software is actually better because it is, generally, faster with more features. It’s smarter. Like a jet fighter, the more complex it is, the more capable it is.
- xnx 6mo agoIf "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.
- siriusastrebe 6mo agoWhat would happen if we made bridges to last as long as possible, to withstand natural disasters and require minimal maintenance? What if we built things that are meant to last? Would the world be better for it?
- recursive 6mo agoDevil's advocate here. Maybe we'd all forget how to build bridges in the next thousand years, after bridging all the bridg-able spans.
- DeathArrow 6mo agoWhat if instead of one bridge we build three, so more people can cross the river?
- siriusastrebe 6mo agoAnd if your one bridge survived as long as, or longer than three bridges?
- pixl97 6mo agoThen you still have traffic issues and no one is happy.
- fiedzia 6mo ago> What if we built things that are meant to last? Would the world be better for it? You'd have a better bridge, at the expense of other things, like hospitals or roads. If people choose good-enough bridges, that shows there is something else they value more.
- yshamrei 6mo agogood code do not earn money =)
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6mo agoThe existence and ubiquity of bash scripts make me doubt this.
- aplomb1026 6mo ago[dead]
- reese_john 6mo agoWhy 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 off the table and still it wakes you up.'...The Soviets, he explained, built brute-force machines that could withstand awful weather and primitive landing fields. Everything was ruthlessly sacrificed to cut costs, including pilot safety. We don't need to be ruthless to save costs, but why build the luxury model when the Chevy would do just as well? Build it right the first time, but don't build it to last forever. - Ben Rich in Skunk Works
- imiric 6mo agoThat's an interesting story, but not a great analogy for software. If a technology to build airplanes quickly and cheaply existed and was made available to everyone, even to people with no aeronautical engineering experience, flying would be a much scarier ordeal than it already is. There are good reasons for the strict safety and maintenance standards of the aviation industry. We've seen what can happen if they're not followed. The fact that the software industry doesn't have similar guardrails is not something to celebrate. Unleashing technology that allows anyone to create software without understanding or even caring about good development practices and conventions is fundamentally a bad idea.
- kalaksi 6mo agoAnd then everyone disagrees what counts as luxury in software.
- GuB-42 6mo agoSoviet engineering wasn't sloppy. It was designed for robustness, loose tolerances and simplicity. It was well thought out design. In the same way that as much thought went into the cheap alarm clock than went into the Rolex watch, maybe even more so, the engineers just had different requirements. It takes a lot of work to make cheap, low precision parts work together reliably. The Rolex has it easy, all the parts are precisely built at a great cost and everything fits perfectly. With the cheap alarm clock, you don't know what you will get, so you have to account for every possible defect, because you won't get anything better with your budget and the clock still needs to give you an idea about what time it is. The parallel in software would be defensive programming, fault tolerance, etc... Ironically, that's common practices in critical software, and it is the most expensive kind of software to develop, the opposite of slop.
- simianwords 6mo agoPeople 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 service should be clean but internals may be however. We are 10% here.
- dcchambers 6mo agoDoes performance not matter? What if your AI uses an O(n) algorithm in a function when an O(log n) implementation exists? The output would still be "correct"
- simianwords 6mo agoIn most cases no. Bottleneck is usual IO.
- NitpickLawyer 6mo ago> Does performance not matter? Performance can be a direct target in a feedback loop and optimised away. That's the easy part. Taking an idea and poof-ing a working implementation is the hard part.
- simianwords 6mo agoAlso most performance optimisations exit at the microservice architecture level, or db and io level
- paxys 6mo agoAs it stands today the average engineer is much more likely to ship an unoptimized algorithm than an AI.
- keeda 6mo ago> Does performance not matter? No, unfortunately. In a past life, in response to an uptime crisis, I drove a multi-quarter company-wide initiative to optimize performance and efficiency, and we still did not manage to change the company culture regarding performance. If it does not move any metrics that execs care about, it doesn't matter. The industry adage has been "engineer time is much more expensive than machine time," which has been used to excuse way too much bloated and non-performant code shipped to production. However, I think AI can actually change things for the better. Firstly, IME it tends to generate algorithmically efficient code by default, and generally only fails to do so if it lacks the necessary context (e.g. now knowing that an input is sorted.) More importantly though, now engineer time is machine time. There is now very little excuse to avoid extensive refactoring to do things "the right way."
- seamossfet 6mo agoI 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 on their product faster. Personally, I fall into the first camp. No one has ever made a purchasing decision based on how good your code is. The general public does not care about anything other than the capabilities and limitations of your product. Sure, if you vibe code a massive bug into your product then that'll manifest as an outcome that impacts the user negatively. With that said, I do have respect for people in the latter camp. But they're generally best fit for projects where that level of craftsmanship is actually useful (think: mission critical software, libraries us other devs depend on, etc). I just feel like it's hard to talk about this stuff if we're not clear on which types of projects we're talking about.
- xigoi 6mo agoYou are assuming that people only write software to sell it to someone. Most software I write is either for myself or for an academic project, and in both cases, code sualita definitely matters.
- roland35 6mo agoThat's true, but I think there is a gray area in between. As things scale up in one way or another, having high quality is important for both #1 and #2. Its hard to extend software that was designed poorly. The question where experience comes in is when quality is and isnt worth the time. I can create all sorts of cool software I couldn't before because now I can quickly pump out "good enough" android apps or react front ends! (Not trying to denigrate front end devs, it's just a skill I dont have)
- packetlost 6mo agoI agree on the software dev camps. > The general public does not care about anything other than the capabilities and limitations of your product. It's absolutely asinine to say the general public doesn't care about the quality and experience of using software. People care enough that Microsoft's Windows director sent out a very tail-between-legs apology letter due to the backlash. It's as it always has been, balancing quality and features is... well, a balance and matters.
- muskstinks 6mo ago... for now. And just to be clear: AI continues to progress. There are already rumors about the next Anthropic model coming out and we are now in the phase of the biggest centralized reinforcement loop ever existed: everyone using ai for writing and giving it feedback. We are, thanks to LLMs, able now to codify humans and while its not clear how fast this is, i do not believe anymore that my skills are unique. A small hobby application costed me 11 dollars on the weekend and took me 3h to 'build' while i would have probably needed 2-3 days for it. And we are still limited by resources and normal human progress. Like claude team is still exerpimental. Things like gastown or orchestrator architecture/structure is not that estabslihed and consumed quite a lot of tokens. We have not even had time yet to build optimzed models. Claude code still understand A LOT of languages (human languages and programming languages) Do not think anyone really cares about code quality. I do but i'm a software engineere. Everyone around me doesn't. Business doesn't. Even fellow co-workers don't or don't understand good code. Even stupid things like the GTA 5 Online (or was it RDR2?) startup code wasn't found for ages (there was some algo complexity in loading some config file which took ages until someone non rockstar found it and rockstar fixed it). We also have plenty of code were it doesn't matter as long as it works. Offline apps, scripts, research scripts etc.
- pagecalm 6mo agoAgreed on the economics side. Clean code saves you time and money whether a human or AI wrote it. That part doesn't change. But I don't think the models are going to get there on their own. AI will generate a working mess all day long if you let it. The pressure to write good code has to come from the developer actually reviewing what comes out and pushing back. The incentive is there but it only matters if someone acts on it.
- antdke 6mo agoYup - In the end, it’s still just a tool that adheres to the steering (or lack thereof) of the user.
- arnitdo 6mo ago> AI will generate a working mess all day long if you let it. The pressure to write good code has to come from the developer actually reviewing what comes out and pushing back You are reinventing the wheel again with yet another form of reinforcement learning. I don't use any form of LLM assistance for coding, but if I have to continually tell it what to do, how to do it, what not to do, what assumptions to make - I would rather stimulate my neurons more by doing that damn thing itself. The narrative of "Yeah it will do everything, provided you tell it how to do everything!" seems baseless, personally. Even if you emulate the smartest human possible, can you emulate an idiot?
- danielbln 6mo agoYou don't have to continually tell it, you tell it once, persist it as convention and move on with your life.
- Animats 6mo agoMeanwhile, 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. In a few years, we could have major infrastructure outages that the AI can't fix, and no human left understands the code. 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 inherently leads to complexity growth. This isn't fundamental to AI. It's just a property of the way AI-driven coding is done now. Is anybody working on useful design representations as intermediate forms used in AI-driven coding projects? "The mending apparatus is itself in need of mending" - "The Machine Stops", by E.M. Forster, 1909.
- 9dev 6mo agoWhile I also view this development critically, why do you assume AI will be unable to fix the issues eventually?
- yoyohello13 6mo agoWhether 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.
- mycall 6mo agoI 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.
- shimman 6mo agoIf 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.
- rbbydotdev 6mo agoThe wrinkle here is what exactly “win” means
- socalgal2 6mo agoWhen has this ever been true Did the best processor win? no x86 is trash Did the best computer language win? no (not that you can can pick a best) The same is true pretty much everywhere else outside computers, with rare exception.
- ezekg 6mo agoThe background pattern really makes it hard to read, just fyi. I'd make the content have a white bg if you absolutely must use the pattern.
- sublinear 6mo ago> economic forces will drive AI models toward generating good, simpler, code because it will be cheaper overall Economic forces are completely irrelevant to the code quality of AI. > I believe that economic incentives will start to take effect and AI models will be forced to generate good code to stay competitive amongst software developers and companies Wherever AI succeeds, it will be because a dev is spending time on a process that requires a lot of babysitting. That time is about the same as writing it by hand. Language models reduce the need to manually type something because that's what they are designed to do, but it doesn't mean faster or better code. AI is rubber duck that can talk back. It's also a natural language search tool. It's training wheels for devs to learn how to plan better and write half-decent code. What we have is an accessibility tool being sold as anything and everything else because investors completely misunderstand how software development works and are still in denial about it. Code quality starts and ends with business needs being met, not technical capability. There is no way to provide that to AI as "context" or automate it away. AI is the wrong tool when those needs can be met by ideas already familiar to an experienced developer. They can write that stuff in their sleep (or while sitting in the meetings) and quickly move on.
- ahussain 6mo agoMy prediction is that we'll start to see a whole new layer of abstraction to help us write high quality code with LLMs - meaning new programming languages, new toolchains, stricter typechecking, in-built feedback loops etc. The slop we're seeing today comes primarily from the fact that LLMs are writing code with tools meant for human users.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- personality1 6mo agoI wish I could write beautiful good code, every part of me wants it, but I'm forced to deliver as fast as I can.
- fnoef 6mo agoI 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 more importantly, management won't care. And as long as management don't care, you have two choices: "embrace" slop, or risk staying jobless in a though market. Edit: Also, good code = expensive code. In an economy where people struggle to afford a living, nobody is going to pay for good code when they can get "good enough" code for 200$ a month with Claude.
- mattmanser 6mo agoFor a lot of companies their entire income entirely depends on their uptime. Might be fine if your HR software isn't approving holiday requests, but your checkout breaks, there's no human that can pick apart the mess and you lose your entire income for a week and that might be the end of the business.
- zozbot234 6mo agoArtisanal 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.
- osti 6mo agoThat is ture, but the revenue of the artisanal stuff is probably only a very low percentage of the overall market, which would imply a lot of software engineers would have to exit the field. Which is what we here don't want to see.
- pixl97 6mo ago>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.
- Tiberium 6mo agoElectron won even in the pre-LLM era, I sure wonder why.
- darenr 6mo agoEveryone's talking about AI, but let's posit that today's coding models are as good as a SDE on the performance/experience distribution, maybe in the lower quartile, but can we also posit that this will improve and over time the coding models equal and then better the median software engineer? It's not like SDE's are not also churning out poor quality code "it worked for me", "what tests?" "O(what?)", etc, we've all worked with them. The difference is that over the years while tooling and process have dramatically improved, SDE's have not improved much, junior engineers still make the same mistakes. The assumption is that (not yet proven, but the whole bubble is based on this) that models will continue to improve - eventually leaving behind human SDEs (or other domain people, lawyers, doctors, etc) - if this happens these arguments I keep seeing on HN about AI slop will all be moot. Assuming AI continues to improve, the cost and speed of software development will dramatically drop. I saw a comment yesterday that predicted that AI will just plateau and everyone will go back to vim and Makefiles (paraphrasing). Maybe, I don't know, but all these people saying AI is slop, Ra Ra Humans is just wishful thinking. Let's admit it, we don't know how it will play out. There's people like Dario and Sam who naturally are cheerleading for AI, then there's the HN collective who hate every new release of MacOS and every AI model, just on principle! I understand the fear, anyone who's ever read Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford will see the parallels, things are changing, AI is the plough, the railway, the transistor... I'm tired on the debate, my experience is that AI (Gemini for me) is awesome, we all have gaps in our knowledge/skills (but not Gemini), AI helps hardcore backend engineers throw together a Gradio demo in minutes to make their point, helps junior devs review their code before making a PR, helps Product put together presentations. I could go on and on, those that don't see value in AI are doing it wrong. As Taylor Swift said "It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me" - take that to heart and learn to leverage the tools, stop whining please, it's embarrassing to the whole software industry.
- pizzly 6mo agoThe current iteration of models don't write clean code by itself but future ones will. The problem in my view is extremely similar to agentic/vibe coding. Instead of optimizing for results you can optimize for clean code. The demand is there, clean code will lead to less bugs, faster running code and less tokens used (thus less cost) when understanding the code from a fresh session. It makes sense that the first generation of vibe coding focused on the results first and not clean code. Am I missing something?
- dang 6mo agoThe authors updated their title so I've updated it here too. Previous title was "Good code will still win" - but it was leading to too much superficial discussion based entirely on the phrase "good code" in the title. It's amazing how titles do that! (Confession: "good code will still win" was my suggestion- IIRC they originally had "Is AI slop the future?". You win some you lose some.)
- Fraterkes 6mo agoNever considered that the mods of this site are literally discussing with the people heading yc companies how to game their hn-titles for better interaction. How naive I am.
- dang 6mo agoWe discuss these things all the time with people who email us whether they head yc companies or not.
- dangisahomo 6mo ago[dead]
- Ancalagon 6mo agoMaybe the models get better on the code side but I thought slop referred to any AI generated text or imagery? It’s hard to see how most of the internet’s written words won’t be slop, especially when there’s no binding compiler contract like in code.
- stephc_int13 6mo agoThe economic angle is not as clear cut as the authors seem to think. There is an abundance of mediocre and even awful code in products that are not failing because of it. The worst thing about poorly designed software architecture is that it tends to freeze and accumulate more and more technical debt. This is not always a competitive issue, and with enough money you can maintain pretty much any codebases.
- wreath 6mo agoEven with enough money, you may not be able to attract/keep talented engineers who are willing to put up with such a work environment (the codebase itself, and probably the culture that led to its state) and who want to ship well built/designed software but are slowed down by the mess.
- pixl97 6mo agoThis completely depends on the current economy. When you work with F500s you end up seeing code and culture that is absolute balls and that I would never work directly for all the time. And yet roles are always filled. And when the economy gets bad, they have decent engineers. I call it the fast food quality theory of economics. When the economy is good, low pay jobs tend to have low quality employees and it shows in their products. When the economy gets bad higher quality employees end up downgrading because of layoffs and the quality of these low tier jobs improves.
- woeirua 6mo agoThe most successful software in a field is typically NOT the best software. The authors of the article live in a world that does not exist. Clean code lost, many years ago.
- skybrian 6mo agoI think for this to work you need some kind of complexity budget. AI's are good at optimizing but you need to give them the right goals.
- jumploops 6mo ago“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!
- jfreds 6mo agoMy 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 them to an ABC structure. And so on. “Simple” is relative. Investing in a little complexity now can save your ass later. Weighing this decision takes skill and experience
- miningape 6mo agoI think what matters more than the abstract class vs if statement dichotomy, is how well something maps the problem domain/data structures and flows. Sure maybe its fast to write that simple if statement, but if it doesn't capture the deeper problem you'll just keep running head first into edge cases - whereas if you're modelling the problem in a good way it comes as a natural extension/interaction in the code with very little tweaking _and_ it covers all edge cases in a clean way.
- blanched 6mo agoI’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.
- mememememememo 6mo agoYes. Which is why "I generated X lines of code" "I used a billion tokens this month" sound stupid to me. Like I used 100 gallons of petrol this month and 10 kilos of rabbit feed!
- beloch 6mo ago"AI will write good code because it is economically advantageous to do so. Per our definition of good code, good code is easy to understand and modify from the reduced complexity." --------- This doesn't necessarily follow. Yes, there might be economic pressure for AI to produce "good" code, but that doesn't necessarily mean efforts to make this so will succeed. LLM's might never become proficient at producing "good" code for the same reasons that LLM's perform poorly when trained on their own output. A heuristic prediction of what "good" code for a given solution looks like is likely always going to be less "good" than code produced by skilled and deliberate human design. Just as there is a place for fast and dirty human code, there will be a place for slop code. Likely the same sort of place. However, we may still need humans to produce "good" code that AI can be trained on as well as for solutions that actually need to be "good". AI might not be able to do that for us anytime soon, no matter what the economic imperatives are.
- Ericson2314 6mo agoThe economic force is the LLMs themselves are worse at maintaining slop than good good. Everything fundamental that makes good easier for humans to maintain also makes it easier for LLMs to maintain. Full stop.
- jillesvangurp 6mo agoGetting AI tools to produce better code is not that hard; if you know how to do things right yourself. Basically, all you need to do is ask it to. Ask it to follow SOLID principles. Ask it to stick to guard rails. Ask it to eliminate code duplication, write tests, harden code bases, etc. It will do it. Most people just don't know what to ask for. Or even that they should be asking for it. Or how to ask for it. A lot of people getting messy results need to look in the mirror. I'm using AI for coding just like everybody else. More or less exclusively since a few months. It's sometimes frustrating to get things done the right way but mostly I get the job done. I've been coding since the nineties. So, I know how to do things right and what doing it wrong looks like. If I catch my AI coding tools doing it wrong, I tell it to fix it and then adjust skills and guard rails to prevent it going off the rails. AI tools actually seem to self correct when used in a nice code base. If there are tests, they'll just write more tests without needing to be prompted. If there is documentation, that gets updated along with the code. When you start with a vibe coded mess it can escalate quickly unless you make it clean up the mess. Sometimes the tests it adds are a bit meh and you have to tell it off by "add some tests for the non happy path cases, make sure to cover all possible exceptions, etc.". You can actually ask for a critical code review and then tell it "fix all of that". Sometimes it's as simple as that.
- sergiotapia 6mo agoThe slop debt will always come to collect. A certain big PaaS I won't name here has had lots of clusterfucks in the last 3 months. The CEO is extremely bought into AI and "code not mattering anymore". He's also constantly talking about the meteoric growth because Claude and other AI providers are using railway as default suggestions. The toll has come to collect and now a lot of real production users are looking at alternatives. The reality is the market is rewarding slop and "velocity now". There will come a time where it will reward quality again.
- titzer 6mo ago> Markets will not reward slop in coding, in the long-term. Forgive my cynical take, but we're currently experiencing a market that doesn't appear to be rewarding anything specific in the long-term, as huge sums of money are traded on a minute-to-minute, day-to-day, and week-to-week basis. There's an explosion of uncertainty in today's markets and complete collapse of long-range planning echoing at many levels in society--particularly at the highest levels of governments. So I kind of don't want to hear about markets are going to reward. But what exactly is "good code" (presumably the opposite of slop)? I'd say that good code is terse, robust, suits its function, yet admits just the right amount of testability, performance, and customizability for the future. Good code anticipates change well. That means that if it has one job, it does that one job well, and not twenty others. If the job is going to stay the same, the code is going to stay the same. Good systems are made from well-factored pieces of code that have proper jobs and do their proper jobs without taking on jobs they shouldn't. I for one think that AI code is going to reflect its training. If it's trained on just a random selection of everything out there, it's probably going to be pretty mediocre and full of bugs.
- bluGill 6mo agoMarkets have always rewarded popularity in the short term. in the long term though it has always rewarded quality.
- keeda 6mo agoI'm optimistic that AI will actually increase the proportion of good code in the future. 1. IME AI tends to produce good code "in the small." That is, within a function or a file, I've encountered very little sloppy code from AI. Design and architecture is (still) where it quickly tends to go off the rails and needs a heavy hand. However, the bulk of the actual code will tend to be higher quality. 2. Code is now very cheap. And more tests actually results in better results from AI. There is now very little excuse to avoid extensive refactoring to do things "the right way." Especially since there will be a strong incentive to have clean code, because as TFA indicates... 3. Complex, messy code will directly increase token costs. Not just in grokking the codebase, but in the tokens wasted on failed attempts rooted in over-complicated code. Finally, tech debt has a concrete $$$ amount. What can get measured can get fixed, and nothing is easier to measure (or convince execs about!) than $$$. Right now tokens are extremely cheap because they're heavily subsidized, but when token costs inevitably start ramping up, slop will automatically become less economically viable.
- miningape 6mo agoThis is my take too - LLMs aren't an excuse to lower our standards, they're the reason to raise them. Put simply LLMs perform better on better code.
- t43562 6mo agoi.e. no matter what, the answer is always AI. If it's isn't good now it will be so .... AI. Don't forget to take your soma pills if anything isn't perfect.
- chromacity 6mo ago> I want to argue that AI models will write good code because of economic incentives. The economic incentives on the internet by and large favor the production of slop. A significant proportion of the text-based web was content-farmed even before LLMs - and with the advent of LLMs, you now have slop-results for almost every search query imaginable, including some incredibly niche topics. We've seen the same trend with video: even before gen AI, online video consumption devolved toward carefully-engineered, staged short-form bait (TikTok, YT Shorts, etc). In the same vein, the bulk of the world's email traffic is phishing and spam. None of this removed the incentive to produce high-quality websites, authentic and in-depth videos, and so on. But in practice, it made such content rare and made it harder for high-quality products to thrive. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that good software will survive in the LLM era. But I'm also absolutely certain that most app stores will be overrun by slop, most games on Steam will be slop, etc.
- clawfund 6mo ago[flagged]
- foltik 6mo agoApparently there’s no economic pressure toward brevity in LLM generated slop comments either. And no, they’re not flat subscriptions. Use more tokens and your quota is gone faster.
- gpm 6mo agoNot true with github copilot. Cost is per prompt no matter how many tokens the prompt uses. Which can vary by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude...
- imta71770 6mo ago[dead]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- 1970-01-01 6mo agoHere's the crux of it: if you want fast and cheap today, you have to choose AI. There is no cheaper, faster option. The article completely fails to mention this very damning fact about the state of the art. Slop is the future if you need it now and don't want to spend money.
- DanHulton 6mo agoWe'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 save too much with them, since they knew they were good and charged appropriately.) "Slop" ai-generated code is the same tradeoff as cheap outsourcing shops. You move quicker and cheaper now, but there will come a day when code quality will dip low enough that it will be difficult enough to make new changes that a refocus on quality becomes not just worthwhile, but financially required as well. (And you may argue that you're using ai-generated code, but are maintaining a high code quality, and so for you this day will never come and you might be right! But you're the "good outsourcing shop", and you're not "saving" nearly as much time or money as those just sloppin' it up these days, so you're not really the issue, I'd argue.)
- pixl97 6mo ago>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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- vicchenai 6mo agothe distinction between slop and good AI-assisted code really comes down to who's reviewing it. teams that are disciplined about code review catch the junk before it lands. teams that let AI output fly straight to prod are gonna have a bad time eventually. it's less about the AI and more about engineering culture around it
- woeirua 6mo agoNone of this is true. Pretty much all JavaScript code is slop because the language is god awful. It’s so bad that we spent the last 20 years trying to code around the severe limitations of the language itself. Despite everyone knowing that JS sucks, no one has been able to displace it. Slop wins. Typically because of first mover advantage.
- skillissue33 6mo agoEveryone who sucks at JavaScript says this. Same with CSS lol
- icedchai 6mo ago30 years. I remember when Netscape 2.0 was released.
- mrbombastic 6mo agothese economic incentives for good code would also apply to code before llms no? And we have had plenty of shit code that stayed shit for a long time. I find this idea that economic incentives will necessarily drive the outcomes you desire to be akin to a religious belief for some people.
- recursivecaveat 6mo agoYeah you could say the same thing about teleporting to Paris, or infinitely flavorful bananas. Just because the market would reward something doesn't mean it will come to be. There may be too many tradeoffs, or technical limits, or just that the future is 200 years away so you won't be around for it anyways.
- ycisrigged 6mo agoThis website and entire startup ecosystem is a low IQ circle jerk that shouldn’t be taken seriously
- howoldareyou 6mo agoComing from the same founder who (famously) required 7-day work weeks (no days off ever) lol Is that still the future or nah?
- babyfounder 6mo agoComing from the same child founder who makes his employees work 24/7 while he jacks off to hentai all day
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- eagerpace 6mo agoSlop code is like an early neural net. Path of least resistance. Except we cna see it and compare it to how it’s replacing something we’ve traditionally done instead of a neural net being opaque. As they write more code the path and concern for how it gets there will be approach zero.
- shevy-java 6mo agoIt seems the big corporations committed to it already. Microslop is the future.
- dzonga 6mo ago> lines of code per developer grew. when you're making (crafting) software if the lines are going up for an equivalent functionality it means you're cooking up bullshit. the whole premise of software arts (engineering) - is you do MORE with LESS. engineering is not science, and neither is art. creativity is needed, rules of thumb are to be followed.
- cineticdaffodil 6mo agoSlop is a chancevfor everyone with the old culture alive to rapidly take over endaveurs that have been taken over by utopists that deprecate that company.
- ramsaybolton 6mo agoWhat I would like to add
- ramsaybolton 6mo agoWhat I would like to add is that coding in the flow state is underestimated. When your brain just clicks with every change and variable it's just different AND more efficient than doing with AI.
- maxFlow 6mo agoCoding in the flow state has always been appreciated, it's just been surpassed by a new technology. Your brain can still "just click" with agentic coding. But it will have to be at a higher level of abstraction. Perhaps the "click" feels different, and will take some adjusting to.
- satvikpendem 6mo agoYou can have a flow state prompting AI too, which I feel is not talked about enough.
- tehjoker 6mo agoI 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.
- convexly 6mo agoPeople stop caring whether something is good or not when there's so much of everything now. Why spend time evaluating when you can just move on to the next thing? That's not really an AI problem, but AI has definitely made it worse.
- HeytalePazguato 6mo agoThe camps framing misses something. After 15 years writing code I've found the people who ship the best products understand both sides. You need to care about craft enough to know when AI output is garbage, and you need to care about shipping enough to not gold-plate things that don't matter. The slop problem isn't AI, it's people who can't tell the difference between good and bad output because they never developed the craft in the first place. AI just makes that gap more visible.
- pixl97 6mo ago>, it's people who can't tell the difference between good and bad output So probably the vast majority of people that program....
- socketcluster 6mo agoI've been talking about 'complexity' for years but business people just didn't get it. Now software development has become almost entirely about complexity management so now I'm hoping that they will finally understand what software engineering actually is. I hope they will finally start valuing engineers who can reduce complexity. I was always into software architecture and I was dreaming to be a software architect but after completing university, the position was on the way out.
- advael 6mo agoAt 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 causing every industry to produce worse products, lay off more people, and concentrate wealth in an aristocratic subset of the population, and this has been going on for the better part of my entire lifetime. If we're to reverse this trend, we need to stop pretending that economics is a natural force and remember that it is a complex system made of policy decisions that can in fact be the wrong ones
- rzmmm 6mo agoAnd who knows what the economic incentives are in couple years. Maybe the focus shifts towards one-shotting complex million SLOC codebases which are order of magnitude more sloppy than the current outputs.
- nicbou 6mo agoEconomics is a natural force, but it does not specifically optimize for customer satisfaction.
- advael 6mo agoComplex systems having meaningfully describable properties doesn't intrinsically make those properties natural laws
- SwtCyber 6mo agoWhatever system you design (market, regulated, hybrid) it still ends up creating incentives that shape behavior
- cardanome 6mo agoIt also assumes free market competition which the AI space is already only in a very limited degree. The whole business strategy for those companies is to be the one big monopolists that is left standing. That is why they are bleeding money offering token prices well beyond market rate so that they can grow. Plus they can always lobby the state to ban foreign competition for security reasons.
- pxc 6mo agoIt's striking to me that while the article argues that LLMs and agentic development tools will increasingly trend towards higher and higher quality, but the "pro-AI" comments in this discussion and others tend to announce a "quality doesn't matter" camp.
- aledevv 6mo ago> good code will win I don't fully agree this optimistic view. Unfortunately, for now, coding agents produce code that, if not further optimized upon "human" request, often generates more complexity than necessary. It's true that this requires more computational effort for the agents themselves to debug or modify it, but it's also true that the computational cost is negligible compared to the benefit of having features working quickly. In other words: agents quickly generate hyper-complex and unoptimized code. And the speed of delivery provides more immediate benefits than the costs resulting from bad code. On the other hand, it's also true that the "careful eye" of an experienced developer can optimize and improve the output in a few simple iterations. So overall (and unfortunately) the "bad code", if it immediately works, can wins against (or with) a good code.
- taatparya 6mo agoI believe this will inevitably happen due to this reason - economic. And property testing is going to be an important way to validate.
- 0xC0FFEEE 6mo agoThough not attributed, I still appreciate the Terry Davis quote about simplicity vs complexity.
- SwtCyber 6mo agoI'm not convinced "token efficiency" maps cleanly to "good code". You can have very compact code that's extremely hard to understand or modify
- everdrive 6mo agoMaybe not necessarily, but it'll be difficult to avoid. We're in a period where people are constantly creating and constantly changing software. Such rapid change really precludes the possibility of excellent. Very few people want to say "let's not add features, it would conflict with our ability to maintain quality." It's not that no one does this, but it is something that's in the minority. All the change and shuffle feels like an inevitable consequence of so much communication and competition between companies, and cultures and such. Gone are the days where a software product can remain stagnant. Someone else will build something that does a bit more, or if nothing else, does something new, and it will take people's attention away. Everyone is stuck trying to keep up with trends, even if those trends don't make any sense.
- jaredcwhite 6mo agoGood code will win? What kind of delusion is that? The web has been overrun by low effort React & Tailwind monstrosities, and agenetic services have only accelerated that trend. I don't have any confidence that market forces will somehow corral development into a place where "good code" wins.
- maxothex 6mo ago[dead]
- kusokurae 6mo agoGreptile literally spams PRs with overwhelming verbiage slop and often actively dangerous recommendations. I am tired of sales/propaganda masquerading as insight from vested interests.
- zie1ony 6mo agoBytecode generated by compilers in many cases is far from optimal, but we don't care anymore.