We need down-vote buttons for slop like this on HN. How can this reach the frontpage?
Since you are reading, here a story of mine. Both me and a friend build a SaaS product using ClaudeCode. We both have 15+ year experience in software (he more in dotNET me more in FLOSS).
He just accepted everything it came up with (pretty much vibe). I was suuuuuuper careful about what I accepted and spend the first weeks programming a lot myself.
His stack for JS was HUUUGE. Several different technologies were used. Mine JS stack was: only use Alpine.js (and avoid JS as much as possible).
His backend stack was equally huge: lots of native/binary OS dependencies bundled in Docker. Mine was 13MB of libs on top of the JVM.
Being one year in I run 3500 tests in 20secs. App boots under 3secs.
He considers rewriting it.
The art(isanal) is still important. Sure it's different now. But MY GOD what a difference a bit of oversight/leadership/tech-vision can make.
I'm glad frontend design skills have moved us away from the generic, inoffensive font families of yesteryear towards the likes of Space Grotesk and a smattering of IBM Plex Mono in places ill-suited to monospace families.
AI slop aside, lately I've been thinking about that term, it seems to fit what I do - artisanal coding. Just saw a comment here saying that it never mattered but at least for frontend it happens there are cases you can still be able to tell where it was made by an LLM agent or it was made by a human.
Take for example this thing I found on HN the other day:
There are lots of magic numbers in the CSS, extra and redundant elements in the HTML that shouldn't be needed if the author was aware of radial gradients, and unoptimized and redundant SVG elements that very well could have been CSS shapes or a single SVG symbol that can be easily cloned and rotated.
I just wish there are still people (and employers!) that actually care for this kind of stuff.
19 comments
[ 80.2 ms ] story [ 499 ms ] threadNow this one. Lol
Can an accountant make a CRM in a weekend? Sure.
Will it be there next week? Maybe, probably not.
Building software was never, not even once, about writing code. That’s easy, literally anyone can do it.
It’s about building something that lasts beyond needing to be completely refactored.
What changed, I wonder? ;-/
It's like the author prompted, "write me a big article on what is and isn't a commodity with AI, and make it confusing"
Such pre-LLM thinking, can't believe it's still a thing.
Since you are reading, here a story of mine. Both me and a friend build a SaaS product using ClaudeCode. We both have 15+ year experience in software (he more in dotNET me more in FLOSS).
He just accepted everything it came up with (pretty much vibe). I was suuuuuuper careful about what I accepted and spend the first weeks programming a lot myself.
His stack for JS was HUUUGE. Several different technologies were used. Mine JS stack was: only use Alpine.js (and avoid JS as much as possible).
His backend stack was equally huge: lots of native/binary OS dependencies bundled in Docker. Mine was 13MB of libs on top of the JVM.
Being one year in I run 3500 tests in 20secs. App boots under 3secs.
He considers rewriting it.
The art(isanal) is still important. Sure it's different now. But MY GOD what a difference a bit of oversight/leadership/tech-vision can make.
LinkedIn introduced a "Seems like AI slop" reporting option, perhaps we should consider asking for one for HN too?
Take for example this thing I found on HN the other day:
https://uiverse.io/GreyD097/great-rat-93
There are lots of magic numbers in the CSS, extra and redundant elements in the HTML that shouldn't be needed if the author was aware of radial gradients, and unoptimized and redundant SVG elements that very well could have been CSS shapes or a single SVG symbol that can be easily cloned and rotated.
I just wish there are still people (and employers!) that actually care for this kind of stuff.
This is either AI slop or AI sycophantism.