I'm not ignoring it, I simply haven't seen compelling evidence of the hype.

Even assuming this is true for the high-end productivity models (like Claude Code), how does this change anything about the main argument?

The AI integrations which are getting forced on me in every single app aren't using those newer models: I try them every few months just-in-case and they are always complete garbage. The people generating SEO blogspam sure aren't going to pay for the fancy models either. And it's not like the herders of the AI bots vomiting comments all over social media care about quality. Unless you are an active ChatGPT / Claude / whatever subscriber, most of your day-to-day interaction with AI will always be with the cheapest slop you can imagine - and that's what the backlash is primarily against.

Besides, I don't actually care whether you are stuffing dog poo or delicious tomatoes in my mailbox, I want it to stop! I never asked for it, and it's ruining all the stuff I actually want delivered to my home. Those integrations are at best as annoying as the "Chat with a sales consultant!" and "Let our site send you notifications!" popups: even if your AI were to achieve AGI, I would still want them gone.

Then stop looking at benchmarks and start looking at mirrors.

For a certain kind of engineer, programming was never just a skill. It was the quiet proof that they were capable in a world that rarely offers certainty. You learn the syntax. You master the abstractions. You tame chaos into structure. Machines obey. Systems bend. The invisible becomes tractable. Over time, that competence hardens into identity.

You are not just someone who writes code. You are someone who understands.

Now imagine watching that understanding become commonplace.

An autocomplete becomes a collaborator. A collaborator becomes a generator. The thing that once required years of apprenticeship begins to appear in seconds on a screen. Imperfect, yes. Crude in places. But undeniably moving.

If your sense of self is braided tightly with that craft, you don’t experience this as a tool upgrade. You experience it as erosion.

And the mind does what minds have always done when erosion threatens something sacred. It fortifies. It searches for certainty. It assembles a narrative strong enough to stand against the tremor.

“It’s hype.” “It produces slop.” “It makes more work than it saves.” “It can’t really think.”

In specific contexts, those statements are accurate. Anyone who uses these systems seriously knows their limits. But watch how quickly narrow truths are inflated into sweeping conclusions. Watch how nuance evaporates. Watch how the exceptions are framed as the rule.

When identity feels endangered, skepticism becomes absolutism.

This is not unique to engineers. It is not even unique to this century. Every community that binds meaning to belief has faced the same reckoning. When a worldview sustains status, belonging, and purpose, evidence alone does not dislodge it. The mind will reinterpret what it sees before it surrenders what it is.

Community is preserved first. Truth negotiates for second place.

On Hacker News, coding is not merely economic activity. It is status, tribe, hierarchy. It is the signal that separates builders from observers. And when the boundary blurs, when machines cross it, something deeper than workflow efficiency is unsettled.

People sense the shift long before they articulate it. They feel the ground change texture beneath their feet. The language of critique becomes sharper. The confidence more brittle. The dismissals more absolute.

Because what is being questioned is not only whether the tools work. It is whether the years invested in mastery will still confer distinction.

There are legitimate risks. There is genuine mediocrity flooding the market. There are economic consequences that deserve sober attention. But beneath the surface of many reactions lies a quieter fear: if this continues, what makes me exceptional?

That question is rarely spoken aloud. It doesn’t need to be. It hums beneath the arguments.

History is unkind to identities built on exclusivity. The printing press unsettled scribes. The camera unsettled portrait painters. The spreadsheet unsettled accountants. Each time, the first instinct was to defend the old boundary. Each time, the boundary moved anyway.

What we are witnessing is not the death of programming. It is the democratization of parts of it. And democratization always feels like diminishment to those who built their lives around scarcity.

It is easier to call the tide fake than to admit it is rising.

That does not mean the critics are fools. It means they are human. They are protecting something that once protected them. They are guarding the altar that gave them worth.

But tides do not negotiate with altars.

They arrive.

* I was also completely unable to find a keyboard shortcut for New Outlook to filter by 'Unread' without performing a search and respecting the inbox search order etc.. Turns out the filter button just above the inbox is a React component and it can't be called from the Alt - key shortcut.

I think no other company managed to get a punny nickname due to their questionable pursuits and actions around new trends. Tho most of them were ridiculed in memes and countless critical posts on the Internet when something have surfaced.

Also, it appears that Microslop was coined first in 1994, acc. to wikitionary [1]

[1] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Microslop

-tracker, -alert or -status would be more proper titles.

The "GALLONS OF SLOP GENERATED" counter suggests some intentionality, and the "Everything seems to be working. Probably a glitch in our monitoring." caption on the status page maybe suggests that is also intentional.

This site would be a particularly interesting example to see the conversation that generated it.

There was a case locally where a political party copped flack for using AI generated images of minorities implying that the people in the picture supported their policies. I didn't think the use of AI was terribly significant when it came to the output because, before AI, they would have just hired some actors for the photos and achieved much the same effect.

The thing that I did think was significant was, in creating the images, they must have committed to writing exactly what it is that they wanted an image of. I really wished that journalists asked for that text, and then challenged the inevitable refusal.

Could be they are renting the domain instead for a fraction of the cost.

> Microsoft bans the word "Microslop" on its Discord, then locks the server. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216047