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I will say that yes, sadly, I have browsed through code written by people, and sadly also have browsed through code written by LLMs. Who do you suppose wrote th

I will say that yes, sadly, I have browsed through code written by people, and sadly also have browsed through code written by LLMs. Who do you suppose wrote the code the LLM was trained on? Divinity? I'm being tongue and cheek, but as someone who uses these things extensively in work and personal projects, I want to point out that it's new or novel that generating lots of plausible code is now vastly cheaper than it once was, so the scales are quite different. And yes, slop is an apt moniker for something that requires lots of careful prompting and configuration and guardrails (which is extremely sensitive to small changes in these initial conditions in ways that can be fairly nonobvious) to produce something that will in most cases read at least a little bit worse than if a human had written it. And it will still go off the rails sometimes! To be clear I don't really agree that typing out the code generated by LLMs is a reasonable counterweight, it largely defeats the purpose. I agree that at a certain point you have to treat parts of your code base like a black box and enforce modularity. But this is still nontrivial, especially in more specialized domains with lots of nuance

locknitpicker 2mo ago
> I will say that yes, sadly, I have browsed through code written by people, and sadly also have browsed through code written by LLMs. Who do you suppose wrote the code the LLM was trained on? Divinity? Training is a red herring. The root cause is constraints, or lack thereof. If you lock a junior dev in a basement and force him to deliver the same features that these LLMs output, you will see exactly the same type of slop. The root cause is that junior devs are inexperienced and oblivious to best practices and guidelines and even the team's internal standards. They output code unconstrained by these guidelines and thus output big balls of mud. > I'm being tongue and cheek, but as someone who uses these things extensively in work and personal projects, I want to point out that it's new or novel that generating lots of plausible code is now vastly cheaper than it once was, so the scales are quite different. I agree, but we need to be mindful of what is the actual root cause. I argue it's not AI coding agente but the diverse source of these code changes, which we also see in production settings in projects managed by large teams. In teams manned by junior devs you see very much the same slop building up to a big ball of mud in a few iterations. This is nothing new. What changed is that now ai coding assistants grant everyone access to what amounts to a large team of junior devs.

locknitpicker 2mo ago

> I will say that yes, sadly, I have browsed through code written by people, and sadly also have browsed through code written by LLMs. Who do you suppose wrote the code the LLM was trained on? Divinity? Training is a red herring. The root cause is constraints, or lack thereof. If you lock a junior dev in a basement and force him to deliver the same features that these LLMs output, you will see exactly the same type of slop. The root cause is that junior devs are inexperienced and oblivious to best practices and guidelines and even the team's internal standards. They output code unconstrained by these guidelines and thus output big balls of mud. > I'm being tongue and cheek, but as someone who uses these things extensively in work and personal projects, I want to point out that it's new or novel that generating lots of plausible code is now vastly cheaper than it once was, so the scales are quite different. I agree, but we need to be mindful of what is the actual root cause. I argue it's not AI coding agente but the diverse source of these code changes, which we also see in production settings in projects managed by large teams. In teams manned by junior devs you see very much the same slop building up to a big ball of mud in a few iterations. This is nothing new. What changed is that now ai coding assistants grant everyone access to what amounts to a large team of junior devs.