Coding is Not a Quantity Game (It Never Was!)

More code is more or less... more liability. It means more stuff to maintain, to look after, to study and debug when things go wrong or something behaves unexpectedly. Simpler is better; usually, as the wise saying goes, "less is more" and/or "more (bloat) is less" (value). The former saying or variant thereof is a lot more common because it is instructive.
All slop developers I spoke to IRL (in real life) do so because their employers - at the command of nontechnical managers - force them to. They quantify "progress" using bizarre yardsticks and believe that LLMs make them more efficient. They don't care what actual developers try to say (more and more are too scared to resist; they say the employment "climate" is scary to them, so they mindlessly "follow orders").
Recently, The Cyber Show was rebuilt almost from scratch; the new site is a less bloated and it's also vastly faster. Look ma, no PHP! Nowadays Andy is writing a long series about "Why I code"; he wittily protests against slop and argues for equipping people with coding skills; the population needs to regain control over its everyday affairs and if coding is "law" (or vice versa), then it must be built around consent.
LLMs are not really novel; they're a pile of bloated garbage. They were not attempted decades ago because one would have to be clueless. People needed to be dumb, malicious (like Scam Altman) or insane to believe that: 1) it would be legally sound; 2) it would be affordable; 3) there would be a way to fund this (except loads, based on false promises).
It's gratifying to see more and more "vice-coded" slop(ware) getting banned. Humans need not learn to tolerate such garbage. Life is too short to deal with 'botspam' or plagiarism (the originals are always better, more reliable or rock-solid).
When slop companies announce an "IPO" it means they sort of "make an exit", recognising they will never make money and instead look for others to bear the losses. █
Image source: Dreams Are More Real
