You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.

Many managers are more bullish on AI and less able to recognize slop, they are unlikely to recognize quality crisis. And they are the people who decide who belong to the industry and who is not. As a result we will get an escalation of enshittification and people will start to forget that slop is not the only option.

I’ve tried to explain this to folks as “having taste”, but I’m always worried it comes off as subjective and snobby. It might be a fair assessment honestly, it’s hard for me to describe so I wouldn’t hold anyone to it as a standard. Give me an honest vibe check on that.

Theres a lot of codebases out there that are at odds with my own opinions about syntax/structure/purpose, but there’s evidence of “taste” that I absolutely respect. I can look at a couple modules, and have a good idea what the other modules are going to be like, because the mental model of the author is clear from the code itself. Even teams with multiple authors with taste average out to one taste-profile and in a similar way, I’ve seen LLM output shaped by someone with taste and had the same feeling: “yeah I see the direction you’re going in”.

Someone without taste using an LLM writes slop. I can’t tell what you’re doing. Any question about what you’re doing results in “sorry that was Claude”. Entirely pointless that you’re even involved.

It’s a property of the author IMO. They were kind of owed an existential crisis as cruel as that is to say.

I think it's likely that what you call slop is more often than not "good enough".

One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one).

With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that really doesn't matter anymore.

Said another way: AI generated code doesn't chase perfection. It just chases good enough.

It was never about the code, all that really matters is does it work.

In that light I’m not happy about it, but the code always was just a means to an end.

My boss pays me for the lines of code, right?

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal

I enjoyed the fact that AI was used to deliver the anti-AI message.