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!