About a month ago, Flathub announced a ban on slopcoded applications. Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis, developer of a number of popular Linux applications and ton of other things, did some research into just how many applications tagged with “AI slop”, a tag Flathub reviewers used to keep track of slopcoded applications submitted to Flathub, actually survived the test of time. The results are exactly what you’d expect.
Of the 120 unique repos, 32 were maintained and 88 were abandoned. No seriously, a big portion of them was completely deleted, nowhere to be found, others stopped 6 months ago, right after submitting to Flathub.
↫ Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis
That’s absolutely soul-crushing. Why should Flathub’s reviewers spend their precious, limited time talking to lazy slopcoders’ “AI” agents to get their slopcoded applications into Flathub, when 70% of these applications are abandoned or outright deleted from existence within mere months of being submitted? Minimal effort for the slopcoders, maximum effort for the reviewers. Just dump a bunch of shitty code over the fence, let a chatbot handle the interactions with the reviewers, and pretend you made a valuable contribution.
This is the contradiction slopcode enthusiasts really don’t want to talk about. If these “AI” tools are so great, where is all the amazing new software? Where’s the massive gains in software quality? Isn’t the story that “AI” tools do the menial work, giving programmers more time to focus on improving their software? Reality does not seem to match the story we’re being sold. Despite these slopcode tools being out and available for years now, there’s no influx of great applications and other software, there’s no rise in software quality, nothing.
What we mostly seem to be getting are slopcoded projects nobody, not even their “creators” care about, so they just get abandoned and deleted as quickly as they were dredged up from the bottom of the programming barrel. These aren’t applications created because someone wanted them to exist; these are applications created because some mid programmer got high on their “AI” supply and fancied themselves better at programming than they really are – only to realise once the comedown hits they’ve got crappy, barely working, entirely unmaintainable gibberish vaguely looking like code nobody can make head nor tails of.
And then they abandon the project, ready for the next high – leaving everyone else to clean up their mess.
What a miserable workflow.
How is your whale doing, Thom?
At this point, I don’t even know what you are trying to achieve here. On the one side, SME software companies, who realign their complete workflow and business model around good LLM models. On the other side, people (who don’t even write code) condemning everything that has anything to do with LLMs/AI (not matter what).
Why is it so hard to accept, that some people (who actually serve their customers and are successful in their business for decades) find those new tools useful, and others do not?
I have actually no problem, to acknowledge that you don’t like LLM/AI. I see not need to continuously tell you how dumb you are in my eyes for not using it or to call you work any names, because I don’t like your tools. (To make it clear, I don’t hold you for dumb at all. I know that you are very intelligent, just hurt because reality pulled the rug under your feet.)
So why are those continuous indirect and direct insults needed? What about you accepting our world same as you expect we accepting yours?
To discuss the matter at hand objectively: Please look at the study is Coelho, Valente, Silva & Shihab, “Is this GitHub Project Maintained? Measuring the Level of Maintenance Activity of Open-Source Projects.” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.04755
Summary of the language finding: The authors compared survival curves for the top-5 languages in their set of unmaintained projects and found the distributions were statistically different (Kruskal-Wallis, p ≤ 0.05). The sharpest contrast was Java versus Ruby — at the four-year mark, Java projects had roughly a 38% survival probability against about 79% for Ruby, with the other major languages falling in between. So Java showed the lowest survivability of the group.
Done in 2020, before LLMs even became a thing.
I do not see, how “slopcode” has changed anything on the question, how many projects would survive.
Looking at my own repos https://github.com/manticore-projects?tab=repositories I can see at least 2 abandoned indeed (they just did not stand the test of time) while half of them look “unmaintained” (simply because there is nothing to do) — leaving half of them active. Welcome to the 1/10 rule of success in real business.
I was excited to see a new video from Youtuber Action Retro (Sean), where he created a simple writing app for the original compact Macintosh line of computers, so those enthusiasts would have a somewhat modern, Markdown format, full screen distraction-free editor for those old computers.
Sadly (though props to him for being upfront about it), he revealed that it’s slopcoded via Claude. I had to stop watching right there, I have zero interest in following a project that is likely full of substandard and mis-licensed code, that Sean himself probably doesn’t understand (again to his credit, he’s not a developer so it’s probably about the same quality as if I had tried to use Claude to write something). I mean, I truly appreciate his effort to do this; his “Frogfind” website is phenomenal and a valuable resource for retrocomputing enthusiasts like me. I just wish he didn’t feel the need to consult a hallucinatory, plagiarist, autocomplete toy rather than lean on the talented and diverse group of friends he’s made over the years in the retrocomputing scene, many of whom are seasoned developers who would probably love to collaborate on such a neat little idea.
I’m not going to stop watching his channel, despite this incident and the general downward trend it’s been on — he seems to be going through some health issues but I’m not going to speculate further as it’s not my business — but he’s still an awesome guy and a genuine boon to the retrocomputing scene.
This is your good right to do, although I would have loved to see a rational example of such sub-standard code to back your claim. Otherwise, it sounds a bit like “don’t buy from Jews”, or if you prefer a more modern German context “don’t buy Chinese cars”. We both know, how this ended.
‘Otherwise, it sounds a bit like “don’t buy from Jews”, or if you prefer a more modern German context “don’t buy Chinese cars”. We both know, how this ended.’
Because avoiding certain production methods and racism are totally the same thing. Parroting this argument is not doing you any favours.
Luckily I am not depending on any favours, but lets try another example then:
I am sure, you know who invented “made in Germany” and why? But this one ended well for sure!
Water is wet. It’s so easy to build.an app now that non-developers now write apps as test prompts to see what will come out. Some don’t even know what maintenance means.
The future is here now, it’s just very unevenly distributed: https://blog.exe.dev/building-software-from-your-phone
That’s just one company where most coding is done by LLMs.
cheemosabe,
That seems logical to me. Whereas hiring traditional software developers used to require a large commitment, the relatively low cost and easy accessibility of using LLM “slop code” as everybody likes to call it makes it far easier for unprofessional amateurs to create one-off projects.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it’s understandable why some are against these cheap & unprofessional software methods…but at the same time it would be hard for me to say that software development should only be accessible to elites.
There’s two sides to every argument. Take a look at generative AI videos…. there’s a ton of slop, which I hate with a passion. Furthermore it’s also clear how AI tools threaten professionals, but on the other side there’s a ton of opportunity to democratize high quality VFX and CGI in the hands of everyone. In general FOSS is about the democratization of software and tools, so arguably FOSS advocates should be in favor of training models on open data, empowering users while respecting rights.
Yes, I have mixed and even plenty of negative feelings about AI in general. While for science and coding there are and will continue to be clear benefits (clear downsides too), with video it’s difficult to see the positive side, at least at the moment. I don’t think I’ve yet seen an AI generated video that I felt brought something positive for me. We have the historical example of synthesizers, which didn’t kill regular musical instruments, but AI makes it possible to create music/video with little input. I guess humanity will get to decide what it finds valuable in whatever emerges. Maybe there will be some interesting audio/visual techniques that will be discovered with AI that people will then be able to apply using traditional methods (similar to how new chess strategies were discovered by AIs since AlphaZero).
Thom Holwerda,
I understand that was rhetorical and that you’d rather ignore actual examples of this, but the fact is AI tools are genuinely making progress at tackling real problems.
https://thehackernews.com/2026/06/ai-agent-uncovers-21-zero-days-in.html
I do believe AI should be debated because there are costs to society and IMHO these costs could be very significant. However I do think that for better or worse these assumptions that AI can’t do anything useful are becoming dated. AI is proving to be capable at taking on tasks that, for one reason or another, humans developers haven’t been doing to a high standard themselves.
Absolutely, I have been talking to some really talented software engineers and SMEs — and all of us a genuinely scared.
The typewriter replaced the scribe. The automobile replaced the horse, and the steam-hammer replaced the blacksmith. But that took decades for each niche — while now LLMs compete in every aspect within less than a year and accelerating. We struggle just to keep up.
Example: I have a fairly complex Frontend for running ARIMA or HoltWinters models on time series. I gave Claude/Fable just a screenshot of this UI not even explaining the underlying mathematical context — and it mocked a much(!!!) better UI and design including ACF, PACF, Residuals and Ljung-Box test! It understood what I was doing just from showing a screenshot!
I’ve been programming since the mid 1980s and I’ve been a professional UNIX/Linux sysadmin for almost 30 years. I know how to write good code and manage servers but I just don’t think it’s fun anymore.
I’ve generated an awful lot of slop for personal use lately and I love it. I fully realize that almost all of it is unreleasable as-is, but it’s tailored to my personal wishes and instead of designing configuration UIs I can just fire up opencode and tell it to change the code when I want to tweak something.
The vibe slop workflows are strongly biased towards putting the code on github and making releases, even if they are not even intended for others to use. Eventually I had my LLM install a personal Forgejo server so now I have a personal private Github+DockerHub clone with Github-compatible actions/workflows and the LLM agents can use it to both post and handle issues and create, review and merge pull requests, without anything leaving my home LAN. All running on a personal server in Dockhand behind a Traefik reverse proxy.
I hardly even sysadmin anymore. I just open OpenCode and type things like “Make service X only reachable from the client with MAC addr 00:11:22:33:44:55” or “Create a nightly backup job of service X to the Backblaze B2 bucket foo and verify a full service restore after every backup in a temporary container. Then send me an email with the full backup, restore and verification log.”
Please allow me to ask: why? Can you elaborate with examples?
It’s often hardcode-tailored to my specific system and wishes and the quality of the code is often not something I want to put my name on. But it works for me. It’s like having a messy apartment that’s cosy to chill in, but you’d want to clean it up before inviting someone.
The biggest reason is that I don’t have energy to deal with users with different needs, though. I vibe stuff to solve immediate personal needs, then I want to move on, not deal with bug reports for things I’m not personally affected by. I already do more than enough of that during work hours.
Thank you, I really appreciate.
I found LLMs especially helpful for deployment (Gradle build scripts, GitHub Actions, Git commits) and UI mocking. Less useful for Business Object Schemas and data structure, those I still do by hand.
Useful tool for some (users or tasks), not for others. Fair.
Temporary problem. LLM coding is relatively new. In the hands of professionals, it probably speeds things up. In the hands of curious non-coders, it most likely yields software that will be abandoned as soon as it is generated. Once LLMs disappear in the background as just another tool in the arsenal of tools, the curious non-coders will have long since abandoned their sense of novelty and the influx of unmaintained, non-coder software will dry up as well.