7 ms·
Stop Slopware
https://ficd.sh/blog/your-project-sucks/ https://ficd.sh/blog/your-project-sucks/
- singularity2001 10mo agoWritten by AI ;) At least it feels a bit like it
- tonymet 10mo agoIf man-made software was high quality, this problem would resolve itself , because “slopware” would be easily distinguishable. The best way to resolve this is to write man-made software that’s good quality. It’s just a tool
- charlesabarnes 10mo agoMy reflex is to call the website useless because the problem isn't usually software produced by individuals. My problem is the buggy messes that trillion dollar corporations produce.
- BizarroLand 10mo agoI mean, look at Microsoft. They're a tiny little 5 trillion dollar company and their own cloud storage software can't reliably extract zip files compressed with their own compression software on their own flagship operating system. How dare some nobody in a third world country use AI resources to accelerate the development of some process that fixes an issue for them and occasionally ask you to buy them a coffee when a poor sad pathetic evil worthless hateful disgusting miserable useless 5 trillion dollar company that actively hates you does the same thing with worse results that makes your life more miserable while lining their pockets with every penny in the entire world?!
- Jach 9mo agoIndeed, Adobe continues shipping their slop and by all accounts of those who keep using it continue to make it worse, this was all in motion well before modern AI tools. If anything, I bet AI tools are more likely to make things better. I read an anti-AI opinion recently where they had a sense that a small open source project was using AI (and were right, it was easy to see by noticing Claude in the commit history) but what tipped their sense was there were too many "professionalisms" in the code base. Oh no, more code that has documentation and tests and benchmarks, the horror! I also just can't take these "it's stinking up the commons" posts all that seriously -- like where have you been the last couple decades? The baseline seems as likely to improve as to degrade more than it already has. Even the spam of useless pull requests isn't new, the peak of that was probably with peak MOOC popularity some years ago when classes would require submitting pull requests to some open source project as an assignment.
- colesantiago 10mo agoMy “slopware” has brought in $200K a month. As long as it works and people’s problems are solved, I don’t see any issue with it?
- abound 10mo agoThis seems directed at people sharing low-effort AI-generated open source projects.
- happytoexplain 10mo agoYou don't seem to be responding to anything the site says.
- indigodaddy 10mo agoWhat's your software?
- legedemon 10mo agoIf possible, could you please explain what your slopware does?
- simonw 10mo ago> if you’re doing this for your own learning: you will learn better without AI. I'm certain that's not true. AI is the single biggest gift we could possible give to people who are learning to program - it's shaved that learning curve down to a point where you don't need to carve out six months of your life just to get to a point where you can build something small and useful that works. AI only hurts learning if you let it. You can still use AI and learn effectively if you are thoughtful about the way you apply it. 100% rejecting AI as a learner programmer may feel like the right thing to do, but at this point it's similar to saying "I'm going to learn to program without ever Googling for anything at all". (I do not yet know how to teach people to learn effectively with AI though. I think that's a very important missing piece of this whole puzzle.) I'm a BIG fan of these three points though: rewrite the parts you understand learn the parts you don’t make it so you can reason about every detail If you are learning to program you should have a very low tolerance for pieces that you don't understand, especially since we now have a free 24/7 weird robot TA that we can ask questions of.
- codr7 10mo agoA robot TA that gives the wrong answer 50% of the time isn't very helpful.
- simonw 10mo agoRight, but this is a TA that gives a wrong answer more like 10% of the time (or less). I think it's possible that for learning a 90% accuracy rate is MORE helpful than 100%. If it gets things wrong 1/10th of the time it means you have to think critically about everything it tells you. That's a much better way to approach any source of information than blindly trusting it. The key to learning is building your own robust mental model, from multiple sources of information. Treat the LLM as one of those sources, not the exclusive source, and you should be fine.
- codr7 9mo agoI would say that's worse, because it lulls you into thinking it actually has a clue. Following your "logic" there; 50% wrong would be even better, since it makes you question it even more. The more you interact with that crap, the less clearly you think; it's the ultimate mind fuck.
- simonw 10mo agoThe author wrote an essay to accompany this site here: https://ficd.sh/blog/your-project-sucks/ https://ficd.sh/blog/your-project-sucks/
- Larrikin 10mo agoWhy would any actual software engineer be against slopware? When it inevitably all comes crashing down because there was no actual software architecture or understanding of the code, someone will have to come in to make the actual product. Hopefully by then we will have realistic expectations for the LLM, have skilled up, and we as a community treat them as just another feature in the IDE.
- gs17 10mo ago> someone will have to come in to make the actual product. My experience has been more that they expect you to fix the broken mess, not rebuild it properly.
- jayd16 10mo agoPersonally, I'd rather make something good instead of cleaning up a mess. But beyond that, I'm really not looking forward to trying to discover new good libraries, tools, and such in 5 years time. The signal to noise is surely dropping.
- throwaway613745 9mo agoNew job title: “vibe coding cleanup specialist”
- quectophoton 9mo agoAbbreviated as "VC Cleanup Specialist". With the ambiguity in the meaning of "VC" being intentional.
- da_grift_shift 9mo agoLaunch HN: Vibely - VC Cleaners For Your VC Slop (YC S25)
- koolba 9mo agoI can see this being a HomeJoy style situation (coincidentally actually backed by YC…), where they claim to clean up all your sloppy code for $40, burn through some more VC (extra funny as it’d be spending one VC’s money to try to clean up another VC’s mistakes), give up on AI and evolve into the usual outsourced body shop, and finally fold when everybody involved realizes the business model is not solvent.
- sapphirebreeze 10mo ago[dead]
- simonsarris 10mo ago> if you’re doing this for your own learning: you will learn better without AI. This is not the distinction I would want to tell newcomers. AI is extremely good for finding out what the most common practices are for all kinds of situations. That's a powerful learning tool. Besides, learning how to use a tool well (one that we can expect professionals to use) is part of learning. Now most common practices and best practices are two different things. They are often the same, but not always. That's the major caveat for many fields, but if you can keep it in mind, you're going to do OK.
- dingnuts 10mo ago[dead]
- jayd16 10mo agoYou can go to a restaurant to see new dishes (which isn't nothing) but it wont exactly teach you how to cook.
- pegasus 9mo agoUnless you happen to meet the unendingly patient and helpful cook who is willing to explain the recipe in any depth one desires.
- avian 9mo agoYou mean the cook who will in the same unendingly patient and helpful manner sometimes confidently suggest putting glue into your dishes and serving your guests rocks for lunch?
- square_usual 9mo agoI'm sure these year-old examples of errors from a bad product are still valid!
- tavavex 9mo ago
- fschuett 10mo ago[flagged]
- colesantiago 10mo agoMost of these people are either: Students Activists Hyper opinionated and “principled” engineers (that won’t touch AI) University professors Engineers working with Linux and Free software who hate AI. They all secretly use ChatGPT when it launched and still do.
- esseph 10mo agoNah, they hate Altman, and many are running DeepSeek @ home.
- colesantiago 9mo agoEven if they run DeepSeek at home, it is still AI. Those who have principles in hating AI should never touch it or use it and swear by that.
- lnkl 10mo agoSeems like this link is for you.
- raincole 10mo agoIt feels like virtue signaling of the year.
- dingnuts 10mo agothe issue is false advertising. you'll understand the first time you lose half an hour evaluating a library that has all the old signs of competent design and even the trivial examples don't work and you realize the project was generated and you've had your time completely wasted
- oofbey 10mo agoIn the new world, increasingly you’ll be better off writing your libraries from scratch than pulling in external dependencies. Less supply chain risk. Less bloat from features you don’t need. Sure complex mature libraries aren’t going away. But for many simple tasks the balance is shifting.
- noman-land 10mo agoAs a practitioner I also inherently believe in well written software but as a lifelong learner, things change, and evolve. There is absolutely no reason why software today has to be written like software of yesterday. There is no need to be so prescriptive about how software is made. In the end the best will win on the merits. The bad software will die under its own weight with no think pieces necessary. On the other hand, code might be becoming more like clay than like LEGO bricks. The sculptor is not minding each granule. We don't know yet if there's long term merit in this new way of crafting software and telling people not to try it both won't work, and honestly looks like old people yelling at clouds.
- smolder 10mo ago> There is absolutely no reason why software today has to be written like software of yesterday. I get what you're saying, but the irony is that AI tools have sort of frozen the state of the art of software development in time. There is now less incentive to innovate on language design, code style, patterns, etc., when it goes outside the range of what an LLM has been trained on and will produce.
- noman-land 10mo agoCitation needed. I see no reason at all why that's true any more than the screwdriver freezing the state of home design in time.
- smolder 10mo agoLLMs aren't like a screwdriver at all, the analogy doesn't work. I think I was clear. LLMs aren't useful outside the domain of what they were trained on. They are copycats. To really innovate on software design means going outside what has been done before, which an LLM won't help you do.
- mccoyb 9mo agoNo, you weren't clear, nor are you correct: you shared FUD about something it seems you have not tried, because testing your claims with a recent agentic system would dispel them. I've had great success teaching Claude Code use DSLs I've created in my research. Trivially, it has never seen exactly these DSLs before -- yet it has correctly created complex programs using those DSLs, and indeed -- they work! Have you had frontier agents work on programs in "esoteric" (unpopular) languages (pick: Zig, Haskell, Lisp, Elixir, etc)? I don't see clarity, and I'm not sure if you've tried any of your claims for real.
- mpalmer 10mo agoYou can't be serious. > When you publish something under the banner of open–source, you implicitly enter a stewardship role. You’re not just shipping files, you’re making a contribution to a shared commons. That carries certain responsibilities: clarity about purpose, honesty about limitations, and a basic alignment with the community’s collaborative ethos. (from the second link) You're not just writing angry screeds, you are producing slop prose and asking us to spend our time reading it. How is this not an implicit repudiation of your entire argument? Are you not hurting yourself by avoiding learning how to write better?
- simonw 10mo agoI'm going to give the author the benefit of the doubt here. Not all "you're not X, you're Y" was written by an LLM.
- adrianmalacoda 10mo agoThat assertion is also highly debatable. To me no part of releasing software under a free license implies a "stewardship role."
- happytoexplain 10mo agoI can't tell what you're referring to. The quote reads well.
- zahlman 9mo agoIt invokes a couple of classic "LLM writing red flag" tropes. But they're ones that are reasonably appropriate in context. I have caught myself on occasion rewriting to avoid looking too much like an LLM. But I've also introduced em-dashes to my writing — here's a gratuitous example just for fun — simply because the LLM slop writing discourse prompted me to research the X11 input system.
- magnitudes 10mo agoI find these really are not only condescending but also really miss the mark and ironically come off as really uneducated in my opinion, and that really is the most infuriating type of condescension. What you call slopware today is becoming less and less sloppy every six months as new coding models drop. In 2 years the “unmaintainable mess” is going to be far better and far more maintainable than anything the engineers behind these snide websites will make. Do folks realize you can also use the same coding models to ask questions and reason about the “slop” that these code models are writing that somehow is able to do something I would never have been able to do before? I don’t really care if it’s 100% accurate, hit it with a hammer until everything makes sense. Yell at Claude and learn how to wrangle it to get what you want, that skill is an investment that’s going to pay you back far more than following the advice of these folks, that’s my opinion. Like “you will learn better without AI” is just a bad short sighted opinion dressed up in condescension to appear wise and authoritative. Learn your tools, learn the limitations, understand where this is going, do the things you want to do and then realize “hey my opinions don’t have to be condescendingly preached to other people as though they are facts”
- JackSlateur 9mo agoThat is your belief, not a fact It has been years since "new models will perform less sloppy code, in 6 months" Current code is still dumb as hell. The emoticons is the part that works really well.
- magnitudes 9mo agoOpus 4.5 is not better and less sloppy by an order of magnitude than sonnet 3.7? Amazing how people can’t look at what’s happening right in front of them
- JackSlateur 9mo agoWhere is the code ? No code ? Only "just see what is right in front of you" and slop ?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- wibbily 10mo agoIt bothers me that so many programmers I know, here and in real life, seem to never actually have cared about the craft of software development? Just about solving problems. I like problem solving too. But I also like theory and craft, and in my naïveté I assumed most of us were like me. LLMs divorced craft-programming from tool-programming and now it seems like there were never any craft-programmers at all. It feels like the group I was part of was just a mirage, a historical accident. Maybe craft-painters felt the same way about the camera.
- bigyabai 10mo agoAfter a certain point, I think "craft" becomes a meaningless and self-flattering scapegoat, similar to how people use "taste" or "courage" as an excuse to make boneheaded decisions. Most software customers aren't buying software because it's tasteful or impressively crafted, but because it fills a gap in their workflow. People who obsess over polish often end up missing the forest for the trees. Plus, code-based meritocracy flat-out doesn't exist outside the FOSS circle. Many of the people you know are clocking-in at a job using a tech stack from 2004, they aren't paid to recognize good craftsmanship. They show up, close some tickets, play Xbox during on-call and collect their paycheck on Friday. The people who care might be self-selecting for their own failure. It's hard to make money in tech if your passion for craft is your strongest attribute.
- tonymet 9mo agoThere’s room for both types of people in any trade. Some photographers obsess over the equipment, some only care about the photos. Carpenters with tools. Musicians with instruments & gear. Every craft has people who care about the how and those who focus on the product. I’ve always enjoyed the craft of software engineering, though even I admit the culture around it can be a bit overly contemplative . Nevertheless, there is room for both personalities. Just hang out with likeminded people and ignore the rest.
- braebo 9mo ago> Just hang out with likeminded people and ignore the rest. Or find ways to integrate with the rest, challenging one another to facilitate growth.
- pbalau 9mo ago> keep the commons clean [from the second link] A glance at the r/python will show that almost every week there is a new pypi package generated by ai, with dubious utility. I did a quick research using bigquery-public-data.pypi.distribution_metadata and out of 844719 package, 126527 have only 1 release, almost 15%. While is not unfathomable that a chunk of those really only needed one release and/or were manually written, the number is too high. And pypi is struggling for resources. I wonder how much crap there is on github and I think this is an even larger issue, with the new versions of LLMs being trained on crap generated by older versions.
- viraptor 9mo agoStorage is relatively cheap. Packages with only one release and little usage in the wild will be a rounding error in cost. A few years ago, Pypi required an over million dollars equivalent in CDN traffic per month. Storing a million of small dead packages is not worth the concern.
- pbalau 9mo agoWhile my research was very shallow, the issue is with the practice. And I didn't look at how large those packages are. It might not be a storage problem right now, but the practice of publishing crap is dangerous, because it can be easily abused. I think it is very easy to publish via pypi a lot of very heavy packages.
- OptionOfT 9mo agoSame on r/rust. Post after post with a new project that does something groundbreaking. Until you look at the source code and notice it's all held together by Duct tape.
- sergiotapia 9mo agoIf you are an experience software developer, AI lets you fly and build things much faster. If you are a new software developer, I don't see how you grow to develop taste and experience when everything is a <ENTER> away. I think we are the last generation of engineers who give a fuck tbh.
- idiotsecant 9mo agoI suspect the effect of AI will be a sort of eternal September, but for software. It's a phase change in how a lot of software will be written and used. There are a lot of applications right now for software where crappy software that mostly gets the job done in a specific way is Good Enough. There's going to be a lot of software written by LLMs that maybe barely compiles and doesn't handle edge cases and has weird behavior but gets a small, specific job done. This is a good thing, since maybe the previous alternative was doing something manually, or not at all. There will still be major, fundamental, foundational software work for serious engineers to do, but we have to admit that most software needed in the world is not that.
- stevesearer 9mo agoThe tools I AI slop/vibe code are more like when I'd use spreadsheets for everything rather than real software. I'm not against taking the time to read the docs, learn to craft code, and ship beautiful projects, but I could have done that before and didn't then either. The difference is that now I have a hundred small, internal tools that save my team time and energy.
- i_love_retros 9mo agoI'm not sure if I am just losing my mind at this point, but all this slop everywhere is starting to be funny. I honest to god am in teams chats at work with high up the food chain architects and leaders (and plain old devs) and people are pasting chatgpt responses either as evidence backing up their claims of how something should be done, or as an actual response to another person as if they typed it themselves. I have people sending me documents they "put together" that are clearly chatgpt generated, tables and emojis included. Is this progress?
- GaryBluto 9mo ago"Stop making software that is buried under heaps of noise" says the 1-page HTML document that somehow has 5 build dependencies listed on it's Git repository. I don't think I've ever seen anything so tone deaf in my life. https://codeberg.org/ficd/stopslopware.net https://codeberg.org/ficd/stopslopware.net
- wkjagt 9mo agoTwo are optional, and the other 3 are just for a small script to convert the one mardown file to HTML and push it live (of which one (awk) you likely already have on your system). It's actually pretty minimalist. Most tone deaf thing you've seen in your life seems a bit over the top.
- GaryBluto 9mo ago> Two are optional, and the other 3 are just for a small script to convert the one mar[k]down file to HTML and push it live (of which one (awk) you likely already have on your system). None of which are needed. Why is an intermediate step needed? > Most tone deaf thing you've seen in your life seems a bit over the top. To complain about overcomplication via an overcomplicated project is a tad rich.
- voxleone 9mo agoIf i had to give advice to young programmers, it would be this: be comfortable with set theory and notation. It’s interesting that once you collect use cases, sketch the objects, and express everything in a set-theoretical fashion, the programs almost write themselves. You can even feed this set-theoretic notation directly to an LLM and get code in return. It’s a perfectly honest way to incorporate LLMs into your workflow.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- boca_honey 9mo agoI've been using Gemini / Antigravity to make a virtual pet for my kids using Love2D / lua. I never coded in my life and have no intention of learning (but I've been learning a lot about game systems and logic, which has been fun). The game is coming along very well and it looks very pretty (I'm a professional illustrator) and if I decide to publish it, no one will care the code is made in AI. It's very high effort, to be honest. You'd had to look into the code to know AI made it. I now get why so many people are making AI art. I see their "work" as an illustrator and it is absolute slop, but I can see now how it might be fun and even liberating for people who don't make a living with it. So I now think twice before calling AI art "slop". Sure, it may be slop, but it's making a lot of people happy and probably opening up new carreer paths for people. And yes, I've been affected financially because of this... but I get it.
- petercooper 9mo agoYour point also touches on the idea that new things are being created that might well never have. Like your virtual pet. You might have been commissioned to illustrate such a thing but most likely not, and it wouldn’t have been “yours.” It reminds me of when desktop publishing, MIDI sequencers, or PowerPoint took off and people produced all sorts of things that were largely not of high artisanal quality but it was new stuff, people got personal value from it (as it was harder to spread stuff around pre-Internet) and the tools eventually matured into what all the pros now use anyway. That said, I concede the critics have many valid points and concerns and it’s going to be interesting to see how we navigate this flood of “stuff” at a scale never seen before. (I suspect it’ll end up like YouTube and video. Ultra long tail. Most stuff never seeing more than a few eyeballs and a smaller group getting the lion’s share of attention, as with most things. Did YouTube change TV and video production more generally? Yes! But it also didn’t destroy it..)
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- armchairhacker 9mo agoI don't think we should shame beginners for using AI. Instead, we should encourage them to try working manually and/or learn fundamentals. Also, public communities have been overrun with low-quality beginner posts for longer than AI. Moreover, you can't convince all beginners to stop using AI, because some are malicious and/or socially inept. Moreso than shame or encouragement, we need a filter for low-quality projects (perhaps a combination of AI flagging and manual review). That would benefit both the beginners and the people who shame them because they're bothered.
- tekkk 9mo agoThe blog post is actually much more rational than some of the comments here. There's a fine balance what I call fetishization of tools and just knowing your craft well. Sometimes, we want to use an abstraction even though simpler approach may be better because we are in hurry, want to learn new things or just dont care particularly. Whose to judge if it works and ships on time? Well, the fool later down the road who has to maintain it probably. But I've never believed in gate-keeping or preaching without pragmatism - I rather put my energy in teaching what little i can and hope that joy of seeing things improve for better will motivate them towards learning. If not, well it's waste of time either way.
- erelong 9mo agoSounds like you mostly want: -to encourage people to develop more basic programming knowledge and skills (with AI or other manual methods) so they don't produce as much "slop" -to catch "slop" being created and either discourage people from using it, or to get manual or AI review of the code to make it "decent", and volunteers working to clean it up or this could turn in to probably a whole industry (of people with some knowledge of how to create their projects, who want professional input or rewrites of their code) So it sounds like a lot of "opportunity" to be made use of in some different ways edit: another alternative might be creating "competing" functioning projects to "slop projects" where applicable (sometimes a good idea might exist, but it could be implemented better or in a complementary way by another project)
- bibimsz 9mo agoas with all advice - disregard it and do whatever you want.
- throwthrowuknow 9mo agoGoing all in on AI generated code has taught me more about project management than I learned in the last decade. I also have a much better perspective on what it’s like to be a client contracting a developer to build an app for them. The best part is the AI actually follows all of the processes that you ask it to. Today was the first day that I wrote code in over a week and I still ended up asking for some review from Opus and it went perfectly. At this point no one has an excuse for shipping slop if they can afford $20 a month.
- casey2 9mo agoThe only way to stop slopware is to write "good software" that solves the problem. Proponents of "good software" are usually terrible at solving problems, and will fight tooth and nail against the idea that there even is a problem. God forbid experienced developers experience pain? What are you talking about? Experienced FOSS devs deserve eternal hellfire. Or rather, they already live in a self-imposed hell.
- cadamsdotcom 9mo agoLow effort projects don’t stand the test of time. The high quality ones always win out eventually. There’s lots of creation going on right now thanks to agentic coding & vibe coding - but also lots of abandonment. It’s easy to confuse “lots of stuff is being tried right now” with “overall quality of software is going down”. But one does not lead to the other. Even if it did, it’d still be exciting. Given a choice I’ll take a vibrant jungle where many ideas are being explored. That’s way more exciting to me than some kind of beautiful garden in which there is no room available for anything new or weird.