Slop is the new normal

AI has its uses. In some places, it can be great, but in others, it will be lethal and have unintended and not thought-out consequences.

Slop in Time

We are living the what? Second year in the 6 months to be replaced by AI?

Yes, it’s certainly better. Today, you can run on a cheap GPU a model that will outperform the first iterations of what was being used with GitHub Copilot.

I remember being excited about using it and how good the completions were. Did I use it to write full functions and whatnot? NO!

I used it as a “super autocomplete” to finish writing the line of code I was already writing.

Nowadays, it can complete multiple lines, even full files.

Slop in Love

While I did remember it completing lines, and today that and more. Nowadays, I see and get more annoyed at how much it fails to do that.

Why does it keep failing me so much? Wasn’t it supposed to be a better model?

At first, it will look perfect, but with time, more cracks will show and love will fade.

Diversity of Slop

This applies to code, images, songs, and any kind of slop there is. Yes, it seems good, at a distance, without caring too much about the details.

An image might get a pass. How long do people stare at those?

A song might get a pass. Just a quirk, some might say.

But code is a prick of a thing. It either will run or not. And even when it runs, it might not do what you thought it would.

And the more you see, the worse it all gets. Generated images are only as good as you look at a distance, and generated music always seems to be the same music, and code is a disaster away because no one is thinking about the details.

Slop is in the Details

I like this masterclass Uncle Bob gave: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo61EKto8ZPHUOld83z0pwpzdlioliu6j

And while I would recommend watching everything, I want to point out first to here where Uncle Bob starts telling that “when you put your foot in the brake of a car, do you believe that there’s a cable going from the pedal to the brake disks? Or do you realize there are ‘if’ statements in the way? Who wrote those ‘if’ statements deciding whether or not to stop the car when you push on the brake?” and then jump a little forward to here where he says that society will wake up to the fact that “we” (programmers) rule everything with code when “a poor programmer does some dumb thing and kills 10_000 people in a shot, then the politicians of the world will rise in indignation and point their finger at us”.

These classes have been on YouTube for over 5 years. I don’t know when it took place, but I’m certain that even before, he probably gave the same speech other times.

In this case, it was about the craftsmanship and even taking jabs at code being written by “some 22-year-old at 3 in the morning”. This was then.

Today, it would be a 16-year-old talking to a possibly hallucinating AI that will throw everything in a word mixer and slop a whole new file with code in every interaction.

Sloping around

Remember when any grocery store wanted a mobile app? (Or maybe you still suffer because you need an app for some dumb thing that didn’t need to be an app?)

Today it’s AI, and be certain that there will be a lot of that being shoved and slopped everywhere.

But more than that… do you trust the custom shopping cart asking for your credit information was “hand-made” or was it “vibe coded”? What about the car you’re driving? Or the one heading your way? Your bank? How about some software that keeps all your memories?

Some people are announcing that the app was “vibe coded” as a mark of pride. I see it as a giant red flag, and I’m sure that many don’t announce it.

I might be an alarmist, but then again, I check both sides of a one-way street twice before crossing.