This is a bit more complex that you make it sound, and I'm wondering this is on purpose.
- Submission based magazines, who pay their writers, like Clarkesworld for example, are being flooded with LLM generated submissions. Those have been automated by people who hit every magazines multiple times with the hope that one makes it through and make a few bucks. This made the work of reviewer absolute hell, their volume of work multiplied by 10.
- The same is true with music, fake bands are being created and the music submitted to streaming platform with the hope that it will generate some kind of passive income
- Etsy shops are absolutely filled to the brim with bad AI slop, the whole platform became barely usable anymore
The same thing is absolutely true with software. You make is sound like it's a few hobbyist that are using AI tools to solve problems and that evil engineers are gatekeeping them because they want to be the only one mastering the arcane arts, but that's overly simplistic and frankly, intellectually dishonest, even if you set aside the fact that at some point one of those vibe coders is going the bite more that they can chew and expose their users, the vast majority of them is looking at making money easily, that means flooding the market with subpar software in hope to generate some money. Just browse a few of the vibe coders subreddits or discord channel to see that it's mostly what is being discussed.
And, I know I'm not the only one that noticed that over reliance on LLMs has some bad consequences on people, especially juniors. Yes it can be used properly in a productive way, but a lot of people don't bother. Make fun of people who are worried about it all you want, but for all the good gen AI will bring, there absolutely will be an enshitification of about everything. I won't even talk about the golden opportunity it is for scammers and malicious agents. I don't know if it'll be worth it, possibly ? But there will be a price to pay.
It would help if the form included a mandatory checkbox stating, "As the author, I declare that I created the submitted work myself without the use of AI." The terms and conditions would state that authors would be banned forever if it was discovered that they had lied.
This attitude is of course very common and I just don’t understand it. Like when I read news from the other political party - it’s just confusing to me.
Are they scared for their jobs? Angry that their hard earned skills are getting devalued? Genuinely concerned about copyright violations in LLM training? Or just don’t want the world to change? (Kids get off my lawn!)
The site describes a specific subset of issues very tersely. Can't you simply disagree with those, rather than imply they are never stated?
Regardless, what's confusing about the list of problems you gave? Are you implying they are somehow un-real in all contexts? The reference to political news is also confusing.
I don't read "specific issues" so much as generalized complaints and implied insults. "Low effort" is not a specific issue - it's just derogatory. "Cut the clutter" is not useful advice. All of it sounds like "code better".
The list of proposed motivations I gave are hypotheticals. I don't understand which if any of these apply to the people who agree with the sentiment in "Stop Slopware". It sounds like maybe you do. Which of these resonate with you?
If AI tools produced good code that was well-designed, nobody would fucking care. Maintainers of repos want good submissions that solve issues, they don't care if you wrote it on a notepad first or generated it in 5 minutes, if it fixes the thing, and is of good quality, it would be accepted.
AI submissions are getting hate because the code isn't good and isn't designed well and the person submitting it would also know that, if they understood what the LLM wrote. Hell, maybe they could even re-architect it into something worth submitting in the first place.
I use AI tools semi-frequently, to get answers, to riddle problems, all kinds of stuff. However if you just punch directions into ChatGPT and copy/paste the answer, you are not growing as a dev, you are not learning, and yeah your code is probably shit. Not sorry.
Edit: And I feel it's an under-observed point that AI-dependent devs constantly try and hide the fact that they are doing exactly that: copying from ChatGPT, because they also know it's shit and they will be judged. So just... STOP DOING IT.
Using Claude to submit PRs to huge open source projects is stupid, for sure.
But if I need a quick tool, like a secret Santa name picker, I’ll just have Claude build it, push it to a repo, link the repo on some PaaS and have a working, deployed app in 20 minutes. No ads, no accounts & no signing up to random websites. I can build it exactly like I want it and include fun Easter eggs for my family.
Building it myself would take 2-3 hours, and the code quality would be drastically better, but that just doesn’t matter.
People aren't complaining about that. What you do in the privacy of your own computer is only your problem. The issue is people pouring a whole "arduous" 2 hours into vibecoding a project, then advertising it and posting to communities everywhere as a revolutionary bullet-proof high-quality project asking for visibility and contributions.
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
In 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.
Seems like this link is for you.
This is a shitpost straight out of 4chan, and it's the top comment after an hour. Do I need to be worried about HN?
And before anybody gets high-and-mighty, I know because I write these too. On 4chan.
Hacker Reddit is socially acceptable nu-/g/. And the quality of nu-/g/ is terrible!
10 points for the first person to admonish me with newsguidelines.html. As old as the hills... ;-)
This is a bit more complex that you make it sound, and I'm wondering this is on purpose.
- Submission based magazines, who pay their writers, like Clarkesworld for example, are being flooded with LLM generated submissions. Those have been automated by people who hit every magazines multiple times with the hope that one makes it through and make a few bucks. This made the work of reviewer absolute hell, their volume of work multiplied by 10.
- The same is true with music, fake bands are being created and the music submitted to streaming platform with the hope that it will generate some kind of passive income
- Etsy shops are absolutely filled to the brim with bad AI slop, the whole platform became barely usable anymore
The same thing is absolutely true with software. You make is sound like it's a few hobbyist that are using AI tools to solve problems and that evil engineers are gatekeeping them because they want to be the only one mastering the arcane arts, but that's overly simplistic and frankly, intellectually dishonest, even if you set aside the fact that at some point one of those vibe coders is going the bite more that they can chew and expose their users, the vast majority of them is looking at making money easily, that means flooding the market with subpar software in hope to generate some money. Just browse a few of the vibe coders subreddits or discord channel to see that it's mostly what is being discussed.
And, I know I'm not the only one that noticed that over reliance on LLMs has some bad consequences on people, especially juniors. Yes it can be used properly in a productive way, but a lot of people don't bother. Make fun of people who are worried about it all you want, but for all the good gen AI will bring, there absolutely will be an enshitification of about everything. I won't even talk about the golden opportunity it is for scammers and malicious agents. I don't know if it'll be worth it, possibly ? But there will be a price to pay.
It would help if the form included a mandatory checkbox stating, "As the author, I declare that I created the submitted work myself without the use of AI." The terms and conditions would state that authors would be banned forever if it was discovered that they had lied.
This attitude is of course very common and I just don’t understand it. Like when I read news from the other political party - it’s just confusing to me.
Are they scared for their jobs? Angry that their hard earned skills are getting devalued? Genuinely concerned about copyright violations in LLM training? Or just don’t want the world to change? (Kids get off my lawn!)
The site describes a specific subset of issues very tersely. Can't you simply disagree with those, rather than imply they are never stated?
Regardless, what's confusing about the list of problems you gave? Are you implying they are somehow un-real in all contexts? The reference to political news is also confusing.
I don't read "specific issues" so much as generalized complaints and implied insults. "Low effort" is not a specific issue - it's just derogatory. "Cut the clutter" is not useful advice. All of it sounds like "code better".
The list of proposed motivations I gave are hypotheticals. I don't understand which if any of these apply to the people who agree with the sentiment in "Stop Slopware". It sounds like maybe you do. Which of these resonate with you?
If AI tools produced good code that was well-designed, nobody would fucking care. Maintainers of repos want good submissions that solve issues, they don't care if you wrote it on a notepad first or generated it in 5 minutes, if it fixes the thing, and is of good quality, it would be accepted.
AI submissions are getting hate because the code isn't good and isn't designed well and the person submitting it would also know that, if they understood what the LLM wrote. Hell, maybe they could even re-architect it into something worth submitting in the first place.
I use AI tools semi-frequently, to get answers, to riddle problems, all kinds of stuff. However if you just punch directions into ChatGPT and copy/paste the answer, you are not growing as a dev, you are not learning, and yeah your code is probably shit. Not sorry.
Edit: And I feel it's an under-observed point that AI-dependent devs constantly try and hide the fact that they are doing exactly that: copying from ChatGPT, because they also know it's shit and they will be judged. So just... STOP DOING IT.
Using Claude to submit PRs to huge open source projects is stupid, for sure.
But if I need a quick tool, like a secret Santa name picker, I’ll just have Claude build it, push it to a repo, link the repo on some PaaS and have a working, deployed app in 20 minutes. No ads, no accounts & no signing up to random websites. I can build it exactly like I want it and include fun Easter eggs for my family.
Building it myself would take 2-3 hours, and the code quality would be drastically better, but that just doesn’t matter.
People aren't complaining about that. What you do in the privacy of your own computer is only your problem. The issue is people pouring a whole "arduous" 2 hours into vibecoding a project, then advertising it and posting to communities everywhere as a revolutionary bullet-proof high-quality project asking for visibility and contributions.
Code meritocracy matters. There's a reason Linux is used by billions but slopware isn't.
the 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
In 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.
Most 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.
Nah, they hate Altman, and many are running DeepSeek @ home.
Even 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.
It feels like virtue signaling of the year.