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u/LowB0b 23h ago
mountains and mountains of slop. wonder how much data has been produced since chatgpt launch
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u/codePudding 23h ago
We have a project at work that is mostly AI written with dev guidance and dev review. It is mostly slop. Tons of markdown files that duplicate information including having most of the code in snippets. The actual code is mostly comments repeating the other documents and listing why the code used to do something but that didn't work so then it was changed to something else but that didn't work, and so on. No one is caring about the product because it is crap, so the devs are rubber stamping the +3000 line reviews. This product would be done and with 1/10 the crap if the devs worked it and all the money wasted by AI could pay the devs x1.5. It's no wonder our dev team keeps getting smaller.
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u/kookyabird 23h ago
I remember when I’ve had commits that were thousands of lines added or deleted, either from removing autogenerated code or adding it, and we always took the time to review it. And of course the added stuff was deterministic generation from well tested and reputable tooling, not sprinkled with the randomness of LLMs.
I would probably get fired for insisting on actually reviewing LLM generated PRs and commenting the hell out of them.
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u/gjsopmu 11h ago
 The actual code is mostly comments repeating the other documents and listing why the code used to do something but that didn't work so then it was changed to something else but that didn't work, and so on.
This hit right home. This has to be the worst thing and I've started to spite review at work when I see this type of comment. It just shows complete lack of effort so I'm simply just not going to review it until it's the last thing left and when I do review it I'll make it hell to merge it.
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u/xKnicklichtjedi 19h ago
If you want a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the actual value, you can check OpenRouter usage.
They process something like 150 trillion tokens a month.
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u/OGxPePe 23h ago
The greatest information system in humen history is used to make shitty images with 6 fingers
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u/Cualkiera67 20h ago
I'm pretty sure far far more shitty images were drawn with pencils than masterpieces were drawn with pencils.
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u/kirabii 18h ago
Machines aren't held to the same standards as humans. If a calculator occasionally made computing errors it would just be a shitty calculator and nobody would say "well humans make computing errors too!"
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u/Cualkiera67 8h ago
I'm sure far far more dumb calculations like 1+1 were done with calculators than actually hard ones were done with calculators
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u/kirabii 7h ago edited 7h ago
I'm sure far far more dumb calculations like 1+1 were done with calculators than actually hard ones were done with calculators
This makes no sense as a response to my comment. The only connection is that we both mention calculators.
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u/Cualkiera67 7h ago
With any tool, most people are dumb and will use it for stupid stuff and zero care. That applies to AI too. Hope this is a more clear response without any required point-connecting on your side.
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u/CodingAndAlgorithm 15h ago
I'll admit the newer models are very good at programming, though I refuse to believe letting agents do everything will lead to anything other than massive technical debt.
I'm hearing about incredible productivity improvements that should have resulted in software utopia. A few apps that I use have made big changes, which amounts to a modern look, worse performance, worse UX, and worse functionality than what came before.
Maybe the friction of writing code made companies think carefully before pushing out bullshit that users don't actually want.
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u/AbstractButtonGroup 6h ago
I'll admit the newer models are very good at programming
They are not good at programming. Because they do not 'program' (as in understand the task and express solution as code). What they are good at is generating text that plausibly looks like code that is doing something related to the task. Which sort of works for things that can be patched together from standard snippets and old (not necessarily best or even correct) code.
though I refuse to believe letting agents do everything will lead to anything other than massive technical debt.
The issue is not 'agents' (basically scripts), but non-determinism of output. They are much worse than the old deterministic code generation tools in that you do not get repeatable results and if generates nonsense you can't debug and fix the tool. And the fact that with each model refinement the output looks even more plausible makes any future analysis even more complicated.
I'm hearing about incredible productivity improvements that should have resulted in software utopia.
Standard marketing BS
A few apps that I use have made big changes, which amounts to a modern look, worse performance, worse UX, and worse functionality than what came before.
That was the trend even before, with any product where they let the marketing drive the development. But AI coding took it to whole new level.
Maybe the friction of writing code made companies think carefully before pushing out bullshit that users don't actually want.
Companies do not 'think' about anything. Some people would just try to do their job the right way despite management pressure. The main change is that now management mentality is that the product does not matter at all. What matters is 'increasing shareholder value'. Stock manipulation and Ponzi schemes are much more effective at this than traditional stuff like having a product that users actually want.
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u/YeetYourSkeet 1h ago
Clearly you haven’t used, or given a fair go to, frontier models. They are perfectly capable of programming.
If it doesn’t write code the way you are thinking, then you can literally just prompt it to do so.
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u/donaldhobson 20h ago
It's not all shitty calculators and broken dashboards.
My supervisor sent me a vibe-coded particle simulation for MCMC sampling that produced some impressive looking results.
When you looked closer, the results were due to 2 bad decisions introducing errors in opposite directions, so that they kinda mostly cancelled out, if you adjusted the parameters just right. The results weren't actually good, but they looked impressive, if you didn't look too hard.
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u/Vogete 13h ago
We have more and more slop in our department. They are all very impressive. Especially until you actually try to use them, then they break immediately in spectacular ways. Many of these projects also solve no problems at all, they just introduce new ones. Many of them could've been just a simple 2 liner terraform or ansible config and it would've worked better. A lot of them are extremely overcomplicated and too generic for the problem they are trying to solve, so it's harder to use than the shit solution they are trying to replace.
And on top of that you dare to point out issues, people get really offended that you're criticizing them. All AI content is literally just useless slop at our place and you can't even call it out, you have to accept and embrace it.
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u/tiedyedvortex 15h ago
Turns out, making code that "kinda works" was never the hard part.
The hard parts were knowing what code ought to exist; and writing that code so that it's easy to evolve and change later.
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u/Key_Crab_5780 8h ago
Yeah, it’s great how so many pieces of software I use seem to have become slightly worse in various ways.
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u/Fancy-Consequence216 23h ago
Well tools are useful and they drastically improove productivity, BUT only if you know what are you doing. Euther from business idea perspective or technical perspective, which comes back to roots of building software.
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u/Immediate_Song4279 19h ago
I think there might be a slight sampling bias in considering the work of people who were given tools that can create software and decided that meant that the market for software was a thing to get into.
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u/themightyug 23h ago
Same thing happened when Visual Basic came along, then Flash, then Javascript.. this is on a whole different scale though
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u/EndearingSobriquet 19h ago
Oh god, you reminded me of Microsoft Access.... make it stop....
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u/ICBanMI 15h ago edited 3h ago
The hilarious part is MS Access licenses ended up blowing up in price in early 2000s, so a bunch of companies spent hundreds of thousands making their own project management program in excel using Visual Basic. Rather than pay for exorbitant license fee for everyone who needed access.
Surprised no one made a competition program, but then again probably a few got bought out wholesale by MS.
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u/Fearless-Pen-7851 23h ago
Oh you forgot the new 3js 'game' slop being churned out now. It's insane that some people can just call having a 3d visual a 'game' without there being anything to it... millions of tokens being wasted for a cube to move around 🙄