>What if the future of computing belongs not to artisan developers or Carol from Accounting, but to whoever can churn out the most software out the fastest? What if good enough really is good enough for most people?
Sounds like the cost of everything goes down. Instead of subscription apps, we have free Fdroid apps. Instead of only the 0.1% commissioning art, all of humanity gets to commission art.
And when we do pay for things, instead of an app doing 1 feature well, we have apps do 10 features well with integration. (I am living this, instead of shipping software with 1 core feature, I can do 1 core feature and 6 different options for free, no change order needed)
I deeply hate the people that use AI to poison the music, video or articles that I consume. However I really feel that it can possibly make software cheaper.
A couple of years ago, I worked for an agency as a dev. I had a chat with one of the sales people, and he said clients asked him why custom apps were so expensive, when the hardware had gotten relatively cheap. He had a much harder time selling mobile apps.
Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser and have no control over.
They allow me to do work I could never have done before.
But there’s no chance at all of an LLM one shotting anything that I aim to build.
Every single step in the process is an intensely human grind trying to understand the LLM and coax it to make the thing I have in mind.
The people who are panicking aren’t using this stuff in depth. If they were, then they would have no anxiety at all.
If only the LLM was smart enough to write the software. I wish it could. It can’t, nor even close.
As for web browsers built in a few hours. No. No LLM is coming anywhere new at building a web browser in a few hours. Unless your talking about some super simple super minimal toy with some of the surface appearance of a web browser.
> You get AI that can make you like 90% of a thing! 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't.
Based on the Adobe stock price the market thinks AI slop software will be good enough for about 20% of Adobe users (or Adobe will need to make its software 20% cheaper, or most likely somewhere between).
Interestingly workday, which is possibly slightly simpler software more easily replicable using coding agents is about the same (down 26%).
I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.
A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
> 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't.
I feel like long before LLMs, people already didn't care about this.
If anything software quality has been decreasing significantly, even at the "highest level" (see Windows, macOS, etc). Are LLMs going to make it worse? I'm skeptical, because they might actually accelerate shipping bug fixes that (pre-LLMs) would have required more time and management buy-in, only to be met with "yeah don’t bother, look at the usage stats, nobody cares".
"terrified".... overused word. As a man I literally can't relate. I get terrified when I see a shark next to me in the ocean. I get impatient when code is hard to debug.
I think that unlike physical art, there aren't actually enough people who recognize or even care about your craft. Sure the codebase is super maintainable and that half-pixel line ties things up beautifully, but nobody cares other than your peers. Your peers won't give you a salary.
As much as we speak about slop in the context of AI, slop as the cheap low-quality thing is not a new concept.
As lots of people seem to always prefer the cheaper option, we now have single-use plastic ultra-fast fashion, plastic stuff that'll break in the short term, brittle plywood furniture, cheap ultra-processed food, etc.
Classic software development always felt like a tailor-made job to me and of course it's slow and expensive but if it's done by professionals it can give excellent results. Now if you can get crappy but cheap and good enough results of course it'll be the preferred option for mass production.
Our definition of slop (repetitive characteristic language from LLMs) is the original one as articulated by the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023. Folks trying to redefine it today to mean "lazy LLM outputs I don't like" should have chosen a different word.
It's the societal level impact of recent advances that I'd call "terrifying". There is a non-zero chance we end up with a "useless" class that can't compete against AI & machines - like at all, on any metric. And there doesn't seem to be much of a game plan for dealing with that without social fabric tearing
LLM are an embodiment of the Pareto principle. Turns out that if you can get an 80% solution in 1% of the time no one gives a shit about the remaining 20%. I agree that’s terrifying. The existential AI risk crowd is afraid we’ll produce gods to destroy us. The reality is we’ve instead exposed a major weakness in our culture where we’ve trained ourselves to care nothing about quality but instead to maximize consumption.
This isn’t news really. Content farms already existed. Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in 1985. Critiques of the culture exist way before that. But the reality of seeing the end game of such a culture laid bare in the waste of the data center buildout is shocking and repulsive.
AI slop is similar to the cheap tools at harbor freight. Before we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were designed to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can just go to harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough for most people.
80% of good maybe reframed as 100% ok for 80% of the people. It is when you are in the minority that cares about or needs that last 20% where it is a problem because the 80% were subsidizing your needs by buying more than the need.
If slop doesn't get better, it would mean that at least I get to keep my job. In the areas where the remaining 10% don't matter, maybe I won't. I'm struggling to come up with an example of such software outside of one-off scripts and some home automation though.
The job is going to be much less fun, yes, but I won't have to learn from scratch and compete with young people in a different area (and which I will enjoy less, most likely). So, if anything slop gives me hope.
You don't want a global authoritarian jewish utopia run by a digital sanhedran? How else will the elite people get robot blowjobs in their flying cars on their way to their transhuman surgery appointments? Won't somebody please think of the juden?!
I have deep concerns surrounding LLM-based systems in general, which you can see discussed in my other threads and comments. However in this particular article's case, I feel the same fears outlined largely predate mass LLM adoption.
If you substitute "artificial intelligence" with offshored labor ("actually indo-asians" meme moniker) you have some parallels: cheap spaghetti code that "mostly works", just written by farms of humans instead of farms of GPUs. The result is largely the same. The primary difference is that we've now subsidized (through massive, unsustainable private investment) the cost of "offshoring" to basically zero. Obviously that has its own set of problems, but the piper will need to be paid eventually...
EDIT: it has been rightfully pointed out that my above comment can easily be read as a racially charged overgeneralization of overseas workers of indo-asian descent. The "cheap spaghetti code" was meant as shorthand for "wildly variable code output with respect to quality and consistency, with no overarching architecture or plan", and was intended to target offshoring _agency_ output along with cheap labor systems that US companies created. These systems attempt to exploit workers at these agencies to avoid paying US salaries and are NOT a reflection on the actual individuals working in the aforementioned cube farms themselves. These workers are already subjected to a number of dehumanizing labor issues entirely outside of their control and I did not intend to further dehumanize. I apologize for my terse, careless wording.
I've worked with, trained and lived alongside workers overseas for months at a time and can say that there's no meaningful difference across racial divides, save for some variation on cultural norms. I would have assumed a more charitable interpretation of my words, but we live in uncharitable times. I'll do better going forward.
I was watching a youtube video the other day where the guy was complaining his website was dropping off the google search results. Long story short, he reworded it according to advice from Gemini, the more he did it, the better it performed, but he was reflecting on how the website no longer represented him.
Soon, we'll all just be meatpuppets, guided by AI to suit AI.
Commercial ventures already had to care exactly to the extent that they are financially motivated by competition forces and by regulation.
In my experience coding agents are actually better at doing the final polish and plugging in gaps that a developer under time pressure to ship would skip.
Meh. Slop is not danger. Because in software lines of code quantity does not have quality on its own. Or if it has it is not a good quality. And bad software costs money. The problem with temu for the west is not that the things sold there are bad. The real problem rose in the last 2-3 years when they become good.
The creme rises to the top. If someone's shit-coded program hangs and crashes frequently, in this day and age, we don't have to put up. with it any longer. That lazy half-assed feature that everyone knows sucks but we're forced to use it anyway? The competition just vibe coded up a hyper-specific version of that app that doesn't suck for everyone involved. We start looking at who's requiring what. What's an interface and what's required to use it. If there's an endpoint that I can hit, but someone has a better, more polished UI, that users prefer, let the markets decide.
My favorite pre-LLM thing in this area is Flighty. It's a flight tracking app that takes available data and presents it in the best possible wway. Another one is that EU border visa residency app that came thru here a couple of months ago.
Standards for interchange formats have now become paramount.
API access is another place where things hinge on.
Why is slop assumed inevitable? These models are plagiarization and copyright laundering machines. We need a great AI model reset whereby all published works are assumed to opt-out of training and companies pay to train on your data. We've seen what AI can do, now fund the creators.
The terrifying part isn't obsolescence. It's mediocrity becoming the ceiling.
AI produces code that technically runs but lacks the thoughtfulness that makes software maintainable or elegant. The "90% solution" ships because economic pressure rewards speed over quality.
What haunts me: compilers don't make design decisions. IDEs don't choose architecture. AI does both, and most users accept those choices uncritically. We're already seeing juniors who've never debugged without a copilot.
The author's real question: what if most people genuinely don't care about the last 10%? Not from laziness, but because "good enough" is cheaper and we're all exhausted.
Dismissing this as "just another moral panic" feels too easy. The handcraft isn't dying because AI is too good. It's dying because mediocrity is profitable.
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[ 9.8 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadSounds like the cost of everything goes down. Instead of subscription apps, we have free Fdroid apps. Instead of only the 0.1% commissioning art, all of humanity gets to commission art.
And when we do pay for things, instead of an app doing 1 feature well, we have apps do 10 features well with integration. (I am living this, instead of shipping software with 1 core feature, I can do 1 core feature and 6 different options for free, no change order needed)
A couple of years ago, I worked for an agency as a dev. I had a chat with one of the sales people, and he said clients asked him why custom apps were so expensive, when the hardware had gotten relatively cheap. He had a much harder time selling mobile apps.
Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser and have no control over.
They allow me to do work I could never have done before.
But there’s no chance at all of an LLM one shotting anything that I aim to build.
Every single step in the process is an intensely human grind trying to understand the LLM and coax it to make the thing I have in mind.
The people who are panicking aren’t using this stuff in depth. If they were, then they would have no anxiety at all.
If only the LLM was smart enough to write the software. I wish it could. It can’t, nor even close.
As for web browsers built in a few hours. No. No LLM is coming anywhere new at building a web browser in a few hours. Unless your talking about some super simple super minimal toy with some of the surface appearance of a web browser.
Based on the Adobe stock price the market thinks AI slop software will be good enough for about 20% of Adobe users (or Adobe will need to make its software 20% cheaper, or most likely somewhere between).
Interestingly workday, which is possibly slightly simpler software more easily replicable using coding agents is about the same (down 26%).
A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
I feel like long before LLMs, people already didn't care about this.
If anything software quality has been decreasing significantly, even at the "highest level" (see Windows, macOS, etc). Are LLMs going to make it worse? I'm skeptical, because they might actually accelerate shipping bug fixes that (pre-LLMs) would have required more time and management buy-in, only to be met with "yeah don’t bother, look at the usage stats, nobody cares".
"Terrified" is a strong word for the death of any craft. And as long as there are thousands that love the craft, then it will not have died.
As lots of people seem to always prefer the cheaper option, we now have single-use plastic ultra-fast fashion, plastic stuff that'll break in the short term, brittle plywood furniture, cheap ultra-processed food, etc.
Classic software development always felt like a tailor-made job to me and of course it's slow and expensive but if it's done by professionals it can give excellent results. Now if you can get crappy but cheap and good enough results of course it'll be the preferred option for mass production.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
Our definition of slop (repetitive characteristic language from LLMs) is the original one as articulated by the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023. Folks trying to redefine it today to mean "lazy LLM outputs I don't like" should have chosen a different word.
It's the societal level impact of recent advances that I'd call "terrifying". There is a non-zero chance we end up with a "useless" class that can't compete against AI & machines - like at all, on any metric. And there doesn't seem to be much of a game plan for dealing with that without social fabric tearing
This isn’t news really. Content farms already existed. Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in 1985. Critiques of the culture exist way before that. But the reality of seeing the end game of such a culture laid bare in the waste of the data center buildout is shocking and repulsive.
80% of good maybe reframed as 100% ok for 80% of the people. It is when you are in the minority that cares about or needs that last 20% where it is a problem because the 80% were subsidizing your needs by buying more than the need.
The job is going to be much less fun, yes, but I won't have to learn from scratch and compete with young people in a different area (and which I will enjoy less, most likely). So, if anything slop gives me hope.
If you substitute "artificial intelligence" with offshored labor ("actually indo-asians" meme moniker) you have some parallels: cheap spaghetti code that "mostly works", just written by farms of humans instead of farms of GPUs. The result is largely the same. The primary difference is that we've now subsidized (through massive, unsustainable private investment) the cost of "offshoring" to basically zero. Obviously that has its own set of problems, but the piper will need to be paid eventually...
I've worked with, trained and lived alongside workers overseas for months at a time and can say that there's no meaningful difference across racial divides, save for some variation on cultural norms. I would have assumed a more charitable interpretation of my words, but we live in uncharitable times. I'll do better going forward.
Cheers
Soon, we'll all just be meatpuppets, guided by AI to suit AI.
In my experience coding agents are actually better at doing the final polish and plugging in gaps that a developer under time pressure to ship would skip.
My favorite pre-LLM thing in this area is Flighty. It's a flight tracking app that takes available data and presents it in the best possible wway. Another one is that EU border visa residency app that came thru here a couple of months ago.
Standards for interchange formats have now become paramount.
API access is another place where things hinge on.
AI produces code that technically runs but lacks the thoughtfulness that makes software maintainable or elegant. The "90% solution" ships because economic pressure rewards speed over quality.
What haunts me: compilers don't make design decisions. IDEs don't choose architecture. AI does both, and most users accept those choices uncritically. We're already seeing juniors who've never debugged without a copilot.
The author's real question: what if most people genuinely don't care about the last 10%? Not from laziness, but because "good enough" is cheaper and we're all exhausted.
Dismissing this as "just another moral panic" feels too easy. The handcraft isn't dying because AI is too good. It's dying because mediocrity is profitable.