Item — HN Reader

"Vibe coding" (i.e. the kind of code that is statistically 'plausible' that sometimes works and the user doesn't look at the code but tries it to see if it works to their liking (with no tests) )

Was the worst thing to happen to programming, computer science I have seen, good for prototypes but not production software, and especially for important projects like LLVM.

It is good to gatekeep this slop from LLVM before it gets out of control.

1 comments

I think it's great that this AI slop fatigue happened so quickly.

Now we can still identify them easily, and I am maintaining bookmarks of non slop codebases, so that I know which software to avoid.

I encourage everyone to do the same because the slopcode fallout will be inevitable, and likely be the most harmful thing that ever happened to open source as a philosophy.

We need to change our methodology of how to develop verifiable and specdriven software, because TDD isn't good enough to catch this. Something that is able to verify logical conclusions and implications (aka branches) and not only methods and their types/signatures.

Not just codebases, but developers too. Keep your eyes open: if someone visibly embraces slop, you know they're a clown. Don't let clowns touch your repos, and do your best to cut out dependencies on anything maintained by clowns.

I don't have enough snark in me (yet) to make a "proud to be AI" list to make such lookups easier.

Personally, I’ve got fatigue at the phrase “AI slop”. It’s used as a catch all to dismiss the content due to the source, regardless of the quality or suitability when taken in context.

Just like everything else these days the responses skew towards both extremes on the spectrum and people hand waving away the advancements is just as annoying as those who are zealots on the other end.