Slop Terrifies Me

by Ezhik • 5 months ago

410 350 5 months 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)

Ezhik2• 5 months ago

The 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• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

ai 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• 5 months ago

This is just the outsourcing argument all over again. Maybe the degrees of difference matters this time?

wtetzner• 5 months ago

I kinda feel like we're at a point where it would be much more valuable to have higher quality software than more software.

andrewstuart• 5 months ago

I 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.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 5 months ago

This 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• 5 months ago

Same. 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.

Ezhik2• 5 months ago

I'm less afraid of people using LLMs for coding well than I am of people not caring to and just shipping slop.

This is the browser engine I was alluding to in the post: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender

fancyfredbot• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

The 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.

beardyw2• 5 months ago

I 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?

lm2s• 5 months ago

Yes, that’s why they are on the race to building the very advanced robots. To prevent the violence towards them.

satisfice• 5 months ago

That 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.

direwolf2022• 5 months ago

Gaza is kept as a testing ground for domestic spying and domestic military technology intended to be used on other groups. Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now. Stuff like Palantir is always tested in Gaza first.

gom_jabbar2• 5 months ago

Sort of. The thing building and being protected is capital, not humans. As Nick Land wrote:

"Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself." [0]

The important part here is that "[i]ndustrialization [...] protects itself". This is not about protecting humans ultimately. Humans are not autonomous, but ultimately functions of (autonomous) capital. Mark Fisher put it like this (summarizing Land's philosophy):

"Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off." [1]

Land's philosophy is quite useful for providing a non-anthropocentric perspective on various processes.

[0] Nick Land (2016). The NRx Moment in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition

[1] Mark Fisher (2012). Terminator vs Avatar in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, p. 342.

overfeed• 5 months ago

To prevent the violence towards them.

"This morning at 8:00 am Pacific, there were 5 simultaneously assassination attempts on tech executives across the Bay Area. The victims, who are all tech executives known to us have suffered serious injuries . It is reported that Securibot 5000s were involved. Securibot inc declined to comment. This is a developing story"

XorNot• 5 months ago

There is no master plan, there's a hype cycle, environment and the market.

Humanoid robots became possible and so people are racing to be first to market assuming that might be a giant market (it's cheap labor potentially so of course it might be huge - the microcomputer was).

jjgreen• 5 months ago

Welcome to capitalism!

smokel• 5 months ago

Besides being a bit of a shallow comment, what exactly do you imply here? That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case, it just needs a stronger government than what the US currently has in place. (e.g. progressive taxation and strong antitrust policy seem to work fairly well in Europe).

Muromec• 5 months ago

It'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• 5 months ago

It's not oligarchy, it's feudalism.

I wholeheartedly recommend you buying a new keyboard, by the way.

kubb3• 5 months ago

I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on, since they'll be the only ones with the income?

temp8830• 5 months ago

They already do. In fact, we are all working in service of their power trips.

ted_bunny• 5 months ago

This is what the service economy in the imperial core already is.

drzaiusx118• 5 months ago

As far as I can tell, the rich have never stopped employing elaborate casts of servants; these servants just go by different titles now: private chef, personal assistant, nanny, fashion consultant, etc.

chung81233• 5 months ago

Who do you think is building the machines for the rich? All of these tech companies are nothing without the employees that build the tech.

graemep3• 5 months ago

They already do and always have. They never stopped hiring butlers (who are pretty well paid BTW), chefs, chauffeurs, maids, gardeners, nannies.....

The terminology may have changed a bit, but they still employ people to do stuff for them

One big difference is while professional class affluent people will hire cleaners or gardeners or nannies for a certain number or hours they cannot (at least in rich countries) hire them as full time live in employees.

There are some things that are increasing. For example employing full time tutors to teach their kids - as rich people used to often do (say a 100 years ago). So they get one to one attention while other people kids are in classes with many kids, and the poor have their kids in classes with a large number of kids. Interesting the government here in the UK is increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school which is the nearest we can get to what the rich do (again, hiring tutors by the hour, and self-supply within the household).

They also hire people to manage their wealth. I do not know enough about the history to be sure, but this seems to be also to be a return to historical norms after an egalitarian anomaly. A lot of wealth is looked after by full time employees of "family offices" - and the impression I get from people in investment management and high end property is that this has increased a lot in the last few decades. Incidentally, one of the questions around Epstein is why so many rich people let him take over some of the work that you would expect their family offices to handle.

latexr• 5 months ago

Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?

Absolutely no one.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/719111/survival-of-t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwJQEAI_KE0

pydry• 5 months ago

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.

Brink? This has been the reality for decades now.

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?

Nobody. They will try to channel it.

I think all signals are pretty inevitably pointing to three potential outcomes (in order of likelihood): WW3, soviet style collapse of the west or a soviet style collapse of the sino-russian bloc.

If the promise of AI is real I think it makes WW3 a much more likely outcome - a "freed up" disaffected workforce pining for meaning and a revolutionized AI-drone first battlefield both tip the scales in favor of world war.

KurSix5• 5 months ago

People in power won't act out of foresight or ethics. They'll act when the cost of not acting exceeds the cost of doing something messy and imperfect

relaxing2• 5 months ago

Even that’s giving them too much credit. They’ll burn it all down preserve their fragile egos.

coldtea13• 5 months ago

They'll act when it profits them.

What's stopping them from good actions is not the fear of "doing something messy and imperfect". It's the lack of financial and power-grabbing motivation.

zozbot2343• 5 months ago

very many will struggle without work or prospects.

People always say this with zero evidence. What are some real examples of real people losing their job today because of LLMs. Apart from copywriters (i.e. the original human slop creators) having to rebrand as copyeditors because the first draft of their work now comes from a language model.

Throaway19822• 5 months ago

book keepers, graphic artists

coldtea13• 5 months ago

Translators, graphic designers, soundtrack composers, call center/support workers, journalists, all have reported devastating losses coinciding with LLM use. And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.

baxtr• 5 months ago

I definitely recommend to watch this video with Reinhold Niebuhr.

Sure some things deteriorate, but many things improve. Talking about a net decline (or net gain) is very difficult.

Every age has its own set of problems that need to be solved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93EJJVAinRc

ozmodiar• 5 months ago

Part of it is also that when we look back we think of people's suffering as sacrifices that needed to be made. Now that it's us being sacrificed it really shifts a lot of people's perspective. I think we need a better solution than letting a bunch of people get fucked so that some other set of people in the right place can have shinier toys in the future. Society needs to handle these transitions better, especially as technology raises the stakes with mass servailance and nuclear weapons.

nosianu2• 5 months ago

There is one thing different though: Technology allows surveillance on a level and scale that did not ever exist before. I would expect that that in turn allows far greater levels of oppression than ever before. And with all payments going more and more digital, if the powers decide to cut you off you can't even buy anything any more. Or get a job. Or go anywhere without being seen and identified by various cameras.

Or, try organizing any kind of movement that those with power don't like. It does not even have to be violent! Here in Germany, as soon as the previous government with the Green Party was in power, a huge never-ending campaign started. Easy - after all, the vast majority of the important media is owned by very few, just like in the US. Funny enough, after inevitably that government failed, turned out the CDU failed many if not most of the promises made, and in other areas does exactly what they heavily criticized.

The point is, surveillance, "soft" punishments, and media control and reach are on a whole new level. Trump wanted TikTok for a reason, and Musk wanted X not for the money that company could make.

The more tech we have, and it's conveniently concentrated too, the worse it can get if you don't want to play that game.

On top pf that, debt and a system of law heavily skewed for those with money, just because of its complexity and to gain access, and no more competition for minds from a block of socialist countries, so no clear alternative apart from obviously stupid ideas most people won't want to vote for, and this "democratic" system can go very far towards being very controlling and restricting for many.

We can see for example in Iran, or few decades ago in China, or since it was founded in North Korea what happens when people protest - and how nothing changes. Now we have billionaires who would love to have similar powers, who don't want to be "held back" by laws and regulations.

Davidzheng3• 5 months ago

"People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much" how is this possible? are the less advanced economies protected from outside influences? are they also protected from immigration?

iugtmkbdfil834• 5 months ago

Not OP, but assuming I am following the argument correctly, I think parent is referring to something else. Advanced economies have participants, who function well in that environment and are shaped by it to a large degree. As a result, if one was to ask them to get food in an environment, where it is not as easily accessible as it is today, they might stumble. On the other hand, in the old country, a lot of people I knew had a tendency to have a little garden, hunt every so often, forage for mushrooms and so on. In other words, more individuals may be able to survive in less developed economies precisely, because they are less developed and less reliant on convenience today brings.

jezzamon2• 5 months ago

It's no coincidence that populism is rising. That's the non-violent way out - electing leaders that are willing to change the dynamics a lot.

pixl9713• 5 months ago

Populism can be a non-violent way out, not is the non-violent way out.

As we saw 100 years ago, violent authoritarians will gladly use technology to make themselves look like the populists choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they promised when they were getting elected.

direwolf2022• 5 months ago

Populism is how you get elected, not what you do once elected. Disregarding current politics, Adolf Hitler was a populist and that didn't go very well, did it? As I see it now, populism means focusing on truthiness instead of truth, charisma instead of competency, and running the country into the ground because those things you don't have are actually important.

drzaiusx118• 5 months ago

History shows that populism often leads to fascism, we should tread carefully.

9rx• 5 months ago

We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy

Not to the degree you might originally think. Most of the wealth being captured today is hypothetical wealth (i.e. promises) to be delivered in a hypothetical future. Except we know that future will never come as the masses, as you point out, have almost nothing, and increasing nothing, to offer to make good on those promises. In other words, it is just a piece of paper with IOU written on it, not real wealth.

What that hypothetical wealth does provide and what makes it so appealing, however, is social standing. People are willing to listen to the people who have the most hypothetical wealth. You soon hear of what they have to say. When the hobo on the street corner says something... Wait, there is a hobo on the street corner?

A small group of people having the ear of the people is human nature. In ancient times, communication challenges left that small group of people to be limited to a small community (e.g. a tribe, with the people listening to the tribe leader). Now that we can communicate across the world with ease, a few people rising up to capture the attention of the world is the natural outcome. That was, after all, the whole point — to move us away from "small tribes" towards a "global tribe".

Hypothetical wealth is the attention-grabbing attribute du jour, but if you remove it, it will just become something else like who is most physically attractive, who tells the funniest jokes, whatever. The handling of "Dunbar's number" doesn't go away.

Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?

China has tried with its Great Wall (meaning the internet one, although perhaps you can find relevance in the physical one too), but is it successful? Maybe to some degree, but I expect many people in China still listen to what Elon Musk has to say, all while completely ignoring the millions of Chinese people immediately outside of their door. It isn't really something a power can do (ignoring that there even being a power contradicts the whole thing). The people themselves could in theory, but they would have to overcome their natural urges to do so.

outime• 5 months 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".

intrasight2• 5 months ago

If it can enable very small teams to deliver big apps, I do think the quality will increase.

KurSix5• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months ago

Every 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.

hereme8882• 5 months 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.

KurSix5• 5 months ago

We'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.

mystraline3• 5 months ago

Its 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• 5 months ago

I 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.

hereme8882• 5 months ago

I hear you, especially as a man, because we're attuned at looking for trouble in the horizon. AI is not some transition from horses to cars, which just meant selling the horse, buying a car, and continue your transport business. It's intelligence that may be able to take over all aspects of our current professional training, thus potentially threatening our livelihoods.

relaxing2• 5 months ago

Step 1: Start looking beyond your code, as the stuff beyond your code is looking at you.

intrasight2• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months ago

As 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• 5 months 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_Einzige4• 5 months ago

Our 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

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• 5 months ago

Words expand meanings all the time and frankly I don't think your narrow definition of slop was ever a common one.

direwolf2022• 5 months ago

Slop 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_Einzige4• 5 months ago

Sloppy joes is either a food item or a slur against the previous democratic president. Checkmate.

zbentley• 5 months ago

I 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.

Havoc2• 5 months ago

The 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

danaris10• 5 months ago

Some 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• 5 months ago

Well that sounds less like a plan and more like a pipe dream.

fragmede5• 5 months ago

We 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.

hgs32• 5 months ago

It's called Universal Basic Income.

I'd rather we democratize ownership [1]. Instead of taxing the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, how about becoming the owning class and reaping the rewards directly?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

ninkendo• 5 months ago

I wouldn't call UBI a "game plan" so much as a thing people can point to so justify their actions to themselves. It helps you pretend you're not ruining people's lives, because you can point to UBI as the escape hatch that will let them continue to have an existence. It's not surprising that so many in the tech industry are proponents of UBI. Because it helps them sleep at night.

Never mind that UBI has never actually existed, it probably never will exist, and it's very, very likely that it won't even work.

People need to face the possibility that we will destroy people's way of life the way we're headed, and to not just wave their hands and pretend that UBI will solve everything.

(Edited to tone back the certainty in the language: I'm not actually sure whether AI will be a net positive or negative on most people's lives, but I just think it's dishonest to say "it's ok, UBI will save them.")

Havoc2• 5 months ago

Not sure I’d count something that is showing little sign of happening as a game plan

KurSix5• 5 months ago

I don't think craft dies, but I do think it retreats

roxolotl• 5 months ago

LLM 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.

KurSix5• 5 months ago

The 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

direwolf2022• 5 months ago

There isn't nearly enough AI demand to make all of these projects turn a profit.

slfnflctd2• 5 months ago

Very 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.]

lbreakjai2• 5 months ago

If quality matters then why is everything crap? Price has a quality of its own.

chung81233• 5 months ago

AI 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.

direwolf2022• 5 months ago

And 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• 5 months ago

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.

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.

chung81233• 5 months ago

Using 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.

tjr• 5 months ago

I’m glad cheap stuff exists. Sometimes I really do need something quickly, and borderline-disposable quality is good enough. But I also want the option to buy better than that.

I installed some drywall a few years ago. I plan to install a room of drywall exactly never again. Not worth it for me to buy the best drywall tools.

But I have installed multiple wood floors, replacing old carpet, and would do so again if needed. I’d rather get higher quality tools there so I can keep them and reuse them for years.

frankie_t• 5 months ago

If 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.

bonoboTP3• 5 months ago

I 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.

direwolf2022• 5 months ago

Focusing on your problem means focusing on minimizing that stuff.. with LLMs it will fester.

drzaiusx118• 5 months ago

I 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...

kjkjadksj6• 5 months ago

Cost 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.

drzaiusx118• 5 months ago

I 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.)

elric• 5 months ago

Instead of money flowing to lower income countries (by virtue of their cheaper labour), which helped those countries grow, money is now flowing to the already richest economy on earth. That's a big difference.

mktk1001• 5 months ago

Interesting how your "structural critique of AI" requires you to characterize an entire workforce of engineers as producing "cheap spaghetti code" from "farms of humans" with a racial meme thrown in for flavor. Code quality tracks with investment and management, not ethnicity. You're not making the sophisticated point you think you're making

drzaiusx118• 5 months ago

I'm specifically speaking of the "race to the bottom" offshore consultancies that exploit cheap labor in foreign, largely asian countries, for export to the US to bypass paying US wages. The preexisting meme I referenced is around corporate lies where their "AI" is largely backed by offshore labor. Think the latest Waymo news, etc. Regardless of those controversies, within the US at least, we've been offshoring technical labor overseas for decades.

I didn't mean to imply that anyone of asian descent is inherently generating "spaghetti code". If that's how it read, I apologize, that was not my intention.

To further clarity, I've dealt with a number of these offshoring agencies (the really inexpensive ones specifically), and their output is very similar to what AI produces today. They have extreme turnover rates, and team assignments change at random so lost context and variable output is common. They do operate cube farms just like US workers, though I'm not sure why that's pertinent to call out though.

I agree, however, that I'm not saying anything sophisticated or complex, merely stating an observation.

drzaiusx118• 5 months ago

EDIT: it has been rightfully pointed out that my above comment can easily be read as a racially charged overgeneralization of overseas workers of indo-asian descent. The "cheap spaghetti code" was meant as shorthand for "wildly variable code output with respect to quality and consistency, with no overarching architecture or plan", and was intended to target offshoring _agency_ output along with cheap labor systems that US companies created. These systems attempt to exploit workers at these agencies to avoid paying US salaries and are NOT a reflection on the actual individuals working in the aforementioned cube farms themselves. These workers are already subjected to a number of dehumanizing labor issues entirely outside of their control and I did not intend to further dehumanize. I apologize for my terse, careless wording.

I've worked with, trained and lived alongside workers overseas for months at a time and can say that there's no meaningful difference across racial divides, save for some variation on cultural norms. I would have assumed a more charitable interpretation of my words, but we live in uncharitable times. I'll do better going forward.

Cheers

secretsatan2• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months ago

Actually Louis Rossmann finding himself forced to convert his genuine advocacy for repair into textual convenience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc

secretsatan2• 5 months ago

That’s the one

bonoboTP3• 5 months ago

Commercial 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.

ReptileMan• 5 months ago

Meh. 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.

fragmede5• 5 months ago

The 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• 5 months ago

Right. 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.

hgs32• 5 months ago

Why 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• 5 months ago

Good 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-agr...

direwolf2022• 5 months ago

Who's going to enforce that, exactly?

slekker2• 5 months ago

Y' know there's this thing called a government

wundersam• 5 months ago

The 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.

gf263• 5 months ago

Speaking of slop..

kjkjadksj6• 5 months ago

For real I’m starting to get a feel for the slop and the first sentance gave me pause. Never mind green username. Classic its not just that. Its this. LLM pattern.

djoldman10• 5 months ago

Now 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• 5 months ago

It 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$?

doctorwho423• 5 months ago

Or, 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.

SpicyLemonZest2• 5 months ago

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.

Sure, but the OP's concern is whether this chokes off innovation. Is there some better kind of hiking boot, longer-lasting and cheaper and maybe more comfortable, that we've never found because the shoemakers who'd be able to invent it are too busy optimizing Nike production lines?

doctorwho423• 5 months ago

Exactly: is the local max or min for (hiking boots) currently the global max or min. And does the way LLMs work limit future exploration because it increases the activation cost of getting out of the local min/max due to the effects on society/workforce/corporate direction caused by LLMs?

djoldman10• 5 months ago

Possibly.

But that question is impossible to answer and therefore can justify no recommended changes to the current state.

ghaff6• 5 months ago

I have custom hiking boots but they're very heavy. I have plastics for winter that are both very heavy and not very comfortable relatively. I rarely wear either.

tuhgdetzhh• 5 months ago

Historically, every major general-purpose technology followed the same trajectory. Printing reduced the quality of manuscripts while massively increasing access. Industrialization replaced craftsmanship with standardization. Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport, yet they won because they were sufficient and scalable. The internet degraded editorial standards while enabling unprecedented distribution. None of these shifts reversed. They stabilized at a new equilibrium where high quality persisted only in niches where it was economically justified.

WalterBright6• 5 months ago

Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport

People have forgotten that a lot of people were killed by horses. Cities had to deal with vast quantities of manure and horse corpses. Horses knew they were slaves and you always had to be careful around them. Horses are expensive and required daily maintenance.

WalterBright6• 5 months ago

The internet degraded editorial standards

I'm not so sure about those editorial standards. The internet has revealed that there's a lot of propaganda in the newspaper editorials.

user____name• 5 months ago

I feel like there's a false dichotomy here where there's an inverse relationship between quality and cost. I know seen plenty of cheap goods that do what they're supposed to and last forever, and I know plenty of expensive projects, both in purchasing price and development cost that are just steaming piles. So you get all this sloppy jank and say "well but at least it's fast and cheap". I'm not sure that's the argument you should be making, why can't we have high quality cheap things in the first place?

djoldman10• 5 months ago

Agreed. "Quality" is a shortcut word to mean an aspect of a product/service that many/most think desirable.

There are examples of seemingly contradictory high/low cost, high/low durability, high/low reliability, high/low status symbol, etc. and seemingly every combination.

Cars are a great example:

* Reliable cars can also be cheap.

* High status symbol cars can be incredibly expensive but also unreliable.

* Expensive cars can be dangerous.

* etc.

autoexec3• 5 months ago

The overall trend is that things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining. It's inevitable when companies insist on endlessly increasing profits.

Even the things that are "good enough" and cheap tend to come with massive hidden costs. For example, good looking clothing can be inexpensive enough for a person to wear everything once and throw it away, but behind the scenes there are child slaves, microplastics/PFAS contamination, and a textile waste crisis.

dijksterhuis• 5 months ago

Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.

nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.

then they get angry. very angry.

just because people don’t care about it now doesn’t mean they won’t care about it in the future.

edit — these are the hidden requirements.

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.

until requirements change, or the hidden requirements come out to play … most software engineers can probably recall multiple times when the requirements changed half way through. hell, i’ve done it on solo projects.

now we’re stuck with boots that can only last 20 miles, but we need to go 35.

encom• 5 months ago

until something goes significantly wrong

Data breaches are so common they don't even register any more, and people share far more personal information now (willingly or not) than they used to. Remember when the common advice was "don't use your real name online"? Now every service demands your phone number to register, and those temporary email services (like 10minutemail) rarely work any more, in my experience. Downtime makes the news if it's bad enough, but Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon still control most of the internet. They fuck up badly all the time, and nothing ever happens. Windows 11 is literal adware, and Linux desktop usage is still a rounding error.

Remember that Tea "dating" app that leaked pretty much everything last year? As far as I can tell, it's still in business.

Many such cases.

djoldman10• 5 months ago

nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
then they get angry. very angry.

Yes, this has a lot of overlap with how humans differ from "Homo Economicus" [0].

Humans generally can't find out, don't know, care to know, have the time to research, or are expert enough to understand the ramifications of decisions perfectly (or adequately to some definition of adequate).

However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.

This, also, has been true for a long long time. Humans are far more likely to choose the cheap option if they don't believe or understand the expensive one.

Incidentally, this is somewhat rational given that marketing half-truths are rampant.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus

BobbyTables23• 5 months ago

It’s the externalized costs that bite society in the end.

The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers, suppliers) except the end user.

A slightly higher quality boot could reduce their expenditure (monetary and time) and collectively allow society to devote the time and resources saved to higher goals.

However the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.

godelski• 5 months ago

This is essentially the literacy component of a Lennon market (which the parent essentially described). Where the consumer can't differentiate a lemon from a peach, only a tad more abstract. The customer has an implicit assumption that it's all equivalent so it gets removed from the decision process.

Which that's probably why we're in a lemon economy. To figure out the answers to these things is incredibly time consuming, even if one does have expertise in a specific domain. Fatigue leads to the same result, oversimplification of assumptions

WalterBright6• 5 months ago

lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements

This is what produced our high standard of living.

For example, Ford and the Model T. Before the Model T, only the rich could afford to buy a car. Ford was relentless with the T in finding ways to cut the manufacturing cost. And the result was America got wheels.

re-thc2• 5 months ago

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.

That's rewriting history especially in terms of software and hardware.

Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.

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.

They don't want to know. They assume it is there. Most people have inherit trust with for example big companies.

In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements.

This is a rewrite of history to. In search? No. More like self create. Was Uber for example searching for the cheapest way? Well, yes, by throwing so much money to have a monopoly. We're currently throwing trillions at AI to find the "cheapest" way. Just like with the dot com era, we might not even recover 1% wasted. Are you sure it is the cheapest?

djoldman10• 5 months ago

Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.

I'm curious if the inflation-adjusted prices of those long-lasting early microwaves were less than the cost of 3 current microwaves that last 7 years. Also, this isn't an apples to apples comparison because they gradually lost performance over time and it took longer to heat up food as they aged.

enraged_camel• 5 months ago

> Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.

This is a common myth that was debunked a while back. Essentially people get fooled by survivorship bias: they only see the few old appliances that somehow survived, and that leads them to conclude that things were higher quality back in the day.

dspillett2• 5 months ago

Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.

That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work.

For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many.

For many reasons.

It means that a good product can be outcompeted by a substandard one because it releases faster, despite the fact it will cause problems later, so good products are going to become much more rare at the same time as slop becoming much more abundant.

It means that those of us trying to produce good output will be squeezed more and more to the point where we can't do that without burning out.

It means that we can trust any given product or service even less than we were able to in the past.

It means that because we are all on the same network, any flaw could potentially affect us all not just the people who don't care.

The people who don't care when caring means things release with lower cadence, are often the same people who will cry loudest and longest about how much everyone else should have cared when a serious bug bites their face off.

and so on… … …

Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?

djoldman10• 5 months ago

> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work.

Ok. Tech folks have been trying to educate users and get them to make better decisions (in the viewpoint of those tech folks) for a long time. And the current state points to how successful that's been: not very. This isn't exclusive to software... many industries have consumers who make unsound long-term choices (in the viewpoint of experts).

Taking advantage? Besides cases where folks are actually breaking the law and committing fraud, this isn't some kind of illicit activity, it's just building what the users choose to buy/use.

It means ... It means ... It means ... It means ...

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, and perhaps.

Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?

I'm not sure what "the way of AAA games" means. I'm just laying out how I view the last 30 years of the software industry.

I don't see any reason to expect significant change.

c0_0p_• 5 months ago

All true, except I think you've conflated software and software product a bit. The author is mourning the craft, the same way the boot makers or furniture makers probably mourned the decline of their craft. We'll still have boots, furniture, and software, but those craftspeople who take pride in it can justifiably feel melancholy about it all.

alexpotato• 5 months ago

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.

Excellent point which leads to one related but less commonly mentioned:

If you build a product that lasts 25 years and that's what people want, you need to price it in such a way that if the entire market buys your product, you will run out of customers (for roughly 25 years or until new customers are born). Otherwise, you have a big rush of revenue early and then it drops off a cliff.

(I'm oversimplifying here but this is partly why there is a trend to make things more disposable or have a limited lifespan).

entech• 5 months ago

While this is true, I believe AI (and other technological advances) erodes the trust embedded in this 'facade'. And that’s how I interpreted the authors’s sentiment.

When you watch a video or use a service that requires significant effort and value to create, you inherently trust that the creators have invested diligence and care to protect their investment. Creators risk losing customers through bad reviews or, worse, being sued for damages.

In an age where it's reasonably straightforward to create something that appears to match the quality and effort of what was previously difficult to accomplish, it becomes harder for users to distinguish high quality anymore.

I think we'll go through a period where many users will get burned by poor services (lost data, security breaches, etc.) and will need to find new ways of verifying product and service credibility.

I suspect the market for simple consumer apps charging $5+ monthly for basic functions (like todo lists) will disappear, and possibly the same for low-to-moderate complexity enterprise apps (like Jira). This is probably better for consumers. Many of these apps and tech businesses can charge so much for fairly basic functionality because the barrier to building alternatives is too great. There was simply no option if you wanted a particular set of features. It's 'value-based pricing' that extracts benefits from consumers unable to negotiate the price.

xg15• 5 months ago

In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements.

Yes. Which means the overall quality of things is dropping. Its nothing new or AI-specific indeed, but that doesn't make it a good thing.

onion2k• 5 months ago

One 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• 5 months ago

Slop 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.)

direwolf2022• 5 months ago

You might install PipePipe or YouTube ReVanced, but they'd sooner ban you as a customer than improve their app quality.

hdaz0017• 5 months ago

We should have also been talking about "devops slop" since 2007! it's good enough we have heard this for how many decades?

tim333• 5 months 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.

atomic128• 5 months ago

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Slop

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439

shmerl• 5 months ago

As it should.

bitbasher• 5 months 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.

kaicianflone2• 5 months ago

I’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• 5 months ago

I 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?

kaicianflone2• 5 months ago

The 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.

b00ty4breakfast• 5 months ago

Generative 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• 5 months ago

From 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_19h13• 5 months ago

And 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• 5 months ago

What 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• 5 months ago

Hopefully 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• 5 months ago

I 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• 5 months ago

That 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• 5 months ago

Tools 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• 5 months 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• 5 months ago

Ikea is great, though

Slop Terrifies Me

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