Slop Cannot Replace Domain Expertise
Yesterday I spoke in great length to somebody whose employer forces her to use "AI" code, i.e. there is the expectation that experienced programmers would resort to slop and integrate untested, sloppy code, without attribution, without basic licence compliance, or even without an extensive audit.
She told me this did not work, but the decision came from above, bolstered by unbacked, unverified, baseless claims that even an experienced programmer would be slower without slop.
There's way too much hype and it cons or fools nontechnical people (read: "managers") to whom every programmer is a fool and so-called "vibe coding" will "save time" rather than interject - without proper tagging - highly problematic code which can crash planes.
Earlier this year a good programmer said: "I have tried many editors, several IDEs, various debuggers, and all manner of new and interesting tools in my career, and continue to do so. Like you, I had held off on trying the tools based on LLMs and even now continue to throw up in my mouth whenever I'm forced, in conversation, to refer to these as AI. Being able to spit out passable marketing doggerel has about as much in common with intelligence as does an American Presidential election. In fact, those two are clearly, deeply related."
Aside from the legal issues, there's a legitimate question that I raised yesterday in the conversation: how is slop any better than searching for existing repositories (with provenance), using existing well-tested and well-documented libraries (reuse/modularity), searching or asking in forums and so on?
This was a rhetorical question.
All this "AI" hype (it's not even intelligence, it's all a misnomer, as many of us have insisted all along) will fizzle and be written off as a failed experiment. Society is nowadays polluting its own codebases (that society relies on) like the Web is being polluted with LLM slop and slop images. Their lameness aside, copyright lawsuits will probably render them extinct - orphaned derivative works from a bygone era. █