Successful contributions to open source projects are a kind of currency. GitHub in particular encourages this in a number of ways: by showing avatars of contributors on repository pages, by showing your contributions to your followers via the activity feed and by signalling contributions per day on the activity graph of your profile. Potential hiring managers often take note of this. Recruiters often find and screen candidates this way. If you are a software developer (either existing or aspiring) looking for work, tuning these signals can often work to your advantage.
Wow, interesting that your view on AI slop is more sophisticated than mine. I had the foundational understanding that AI slop was closer to a code smell than specifically a claim on project sustainability.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, my belief had deep implications on project sustainability. It was effectively that AI slop was the pattern where AI produced code would bloat the project with things that don’t make sense to a more experienced developer. Like unit testing that old function signatures are no longer used. Or choosing to implement an algorithm yourself where using another dependency would have been far more reasonable. These decisions bloat the project can kill one’s ability to reason about it. Not to mention weird abstractions in the code,
*Managerclasses with proxy methods hiding functionality that would have been better demonstrated in the front of the code.You’ve pointed out that AI slop is not the pattern, but instead the result of ignorance toward the complexity of producing publicly shareable code when given tools that allow them to confidently test and ship code on a single device. That makes it more of a problem of scope of intent not matching scope of implementation, rather than a problem of AI fundamentally being shit at coding in complex situations. I mean, if it’s just that AI slop is primarily when code is unsustainable in essence, then in theory at least, AI slop could just find a route toward sustainability and then it’s defacto not slop anymore.
Am I catching that right? I might have smoked a bit too much, maybe that’s it.
I think my issue with the vibe coding trend is that it’s made programming too accessible. Not that that’s a bad thing, but that people without the fundamentals are selling what look to be complete projects. AI could eventually get so good at programming that it’s indistinguishable from a human’s but without an understanding of why it’s doing things, the people vibe coding have no real way of offering support, fixing bugs, or making updates to keep the program working as software updates.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a programmer, just a 3D artist. I did half a computer science degree before dropping out lol. My partner is a software engineer and uses AI to help on occasion. But he knows when the ai has made a mistake, or when to use specific code snippets and how to edit them if the result isn’t perfect. He’s said it helps speed things up and give him a base to work from. People with no coding experience that are letting the ai do everything get something akin to garbled text or extra fingers that the image generators produce. It’s just never 100% what you’re trying to get, and they settle for close enough because they have no idea how to fix it.
I’ve made the mistake of trying out a few vibe coded projects (without knowing they were at first) and there’s almost always a problem with it that an experienced programmer wouldn’t have made. Like the mouse is somehow not clicking the right spot, or the UI is difficult to navigate/operate. And the issue I pointed out in my first comment, it breaks when you try and use it on any new update and they don’t plan on offering any support. They wouldn’t know where to begin to update it without getting the ai to just remake it from scratch with a different prompt.
I think my lack of programming experience combined with the bit of schooling I got in the subject is what’s giving me this perspective. I know for a fact that if I got an ai to write an entire program for me that I wouldn’t know how to make any changes or updates. I would just have to keep prompting it until I got something that was good enough. If someone asked me for help with it I’d have no answer. And people are asking money for stuff written like that without disclosing the fact that it’s basically unsupported.
I’ve also seen open source projects begging people to stop submitting vibe coded shit, because it’s completely flooded them with crap that’s broken or not up to standard and actual programmers are drowned out which is essentially killing open source.
My boss vibe coded out team tracker. It exists in sharepoint and has a dependency on OneDrive for local sync. You prepend a .txt with your new weekly tasks, run a python program to ingest the update into a static html, open the html in browser to an interactive tracker, update the status of historic tasks in there, export the changes as text, then prepend the export to a second .txt. He says “those text files are your only deliverables.”
So that’s vibe coding from my point of view. A big ol’ pain in the ass.
Exactly. Sounds like your boss just asked the ai for a program that does team tracking and this is what it gave him. No understanding of how or why, and all pretense of best practices is out the window.
Meanwhile ask anyone with a basic understanding of software and programming and they’d be able to whip something basic up that works and isn’t difficult to use. And if there’s an issue, they’ll know how to fix it or make changes if boss doesn’t like something about it. Meanwhile your boss will probably defend his clunky slop to the grave, because he made it and calling it out is a personal attack on him.