Slop is not necessarily the future

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.

- 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!

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.

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.

  Why build each new airplane with the care and precision of a Rolls-Royce? In the early 1970s, Kelly Johnson and I [Ben Rich] had dinner in Los Angeles with the great Soviet aerodynamicist Alexander Tupolev, designer of their backfire Bear bomber. 'You Americans build airplanes like a Rolex watch,' he told us. 'Knock it off the night table and it stops ticking. We build airplanes like a cheap alarm clock. But knock it 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

(Confession: "good code will still win" was my suggestion- IIRC they originally had "Is AI slop the future?". You win some you lose some.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

People forget that good engineering isn't "the strongest bridge", but the cheapest bridge that just barely won't fail under conditions.

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.

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.

The slop we're seeing today comes primarily from the fact that LLMs are writing code with tools meant for human users.

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.

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.