Is it a slop if it's not sloppy?

https://mkagenius.substack.com/p/is-it-a-slop-if-its-not-sloppy

by mkagenius • 3 days ago

4 6 3 days ago

mkagenius.substack.com

Terr_• 3 days ago

Yes. The deliverable is not the work done. Imagine you a patch submitted to your code base, you have to decide whether to start deeply reviewing it.

You are given an envelope, with a message inside revealing whether the patch came from a human contributor with expertise in the field, or whether it was prompted with "make stuff better" out of an LLM.

Do you throw the "useless" envelope away without opening it? Authorship indirectly tells us things about other work that happened, like checking alternative approaches, checking for edge-cases, and considering future work.

mkagenius3• 3 days ago

I am not saying that you hide it. I am asking is it still fair to treat it as a "slop"? slop being a derogatory term here

rcgy2• 3 days ago

This is a pretty lazy post. Sure, the quality of code that AI produces has gone up. "Sloppy" means so much more than just "incorrect", though; it's bloating tests with additions that don't meaningfully add anything or actually test the code. Code used to be slow to write, quick to read. With AI, it's quick to write, slow to read. Thing is, that has never been the bottleneck. Often, it's a feature- you want to think before committing to an approach. If there is no barrier to putting pen to paper, you get... Slop.

mkagenius3• 3 days ago

What I meant to say there is, all the bloats are going away as we speak, is the bun rewrite a bloat? A slop? why would you call it one if it's not. What if we used AI in a way that produced genuinely better work than humans.

rcgy2• 3 days ago

The bun "rewrite" is almost the definition of slop. Careless, unthinking, and wasteful. A huge architectural shift, with the claimed benefits already being available within Zig. It's not a rewrite, it's a port, with almost 1:1 mappings in unsafe blocks. It wasn't idiomatic Zig, and it certainly isn't idiomatic Rust.

Is it a slop if it's not sloppy?

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